Dinner Bowl #22

 

I'm romanticizing the fall, maybe, but I wanted a meal that screamed "seasonal," and this delivered: Beet quinoa salad with butternut squash, kale, and pecans (recipe from Daisy Beet) and some Italian fusion tofu.

The recipe asks you to toast pecans on the stove, which made no sense to me given that the oven was already on at 410 degrees for the butternut squash (and would have been for the beets, had I needed to cook mine, but I'd already roasted those a few days ago). I just put the pecans on a baking tray lined with a silicone mat and pulled it out a few minutes later; they were perfect.

In order to veganize the recipe, I used some vegan honey--yes, I found some again!--and some yellow mustard. It was a bit more mustard-heavy than intended, I think, but still delicious.

If you want your salad to look like the one in the original recipe photos, you'll need to keep the beets separate and just add them as a garnish; otherwise, everything is going to get beet-colored. I don't mind this, but I did reserve a bit of the other ingredients to garnish the salad for the photo for you, so I'd get some more vibrancy out of the squash.

It was good! I am unlikely to make it again because it wasn't absolutely amazing and it was kind of a lot of trouble for a salad, but I'm glad I had it.