Nurturing my inner... compare and contrast

Let's get right to it today.

Mediterranean Harvest Grains Blend Salad

1 cup of Trader Joe's Harvest Grains Blend, cooked and drained
1 heaping tbsp sundried tomatoes, reconstituted and chopped
1 heaping tbsp calamata olives, chopped
1/2 tsp capers, chopped
2 tsps olive oil
1 tsp fresh cilantro, chopped
2 tbsps feta cheese, crumbled
Dash of salt

I had a hankering.  For olives, sundried tomatoes and feta.  I wasn't sure what vehicle I was planning on putting them into for the journey to my mouth, but I figured I'd just start with that and maybe something would come to me.

Vacuum-sealed bag.

I recently purchased a different kind of sundried tomatoes than I was normally used to.  Most often I buy the ones packed in oil that are ready to go, but I thought I'd try the plain dried ones from Whole Foods.

Barely recognizable as tomatoes.

In order to get these tomatoes back to their edible form, you have to soak them.  So there is just a little plan ahead time.  I cut these into strips because they are easier to chop when they are dry.

A sharp knife helps to slice the tomato jerky.

I put them into a bowl and added boiling water.  About a cup to the six tomatoes I had sliced.

Hot water helps with quick absorption.

They start out looking like this:

Rather scraggly.

And in thirty minutes to an hour they swell up and the water turns a deeper crimson like this:

Plumped up! Now that really is a big difference.

In fact, they swelled up so much, I decided that the strips I had cut were too big and I wanted them to be diced smaller, but chopping them when soft was a bit messy.

What an hour won't do for transformation.

It was easiest for me to buy some pitted calamata olives from the olive bar, Wegmans for these, than to have to buy them and pit every one.  Who wants to spend that kind of time giving individual attention to each olive when you can buy them already ready for you.

And thank you Wegmans for doing all the work.
Or at least most of it.

All I had to do was chop the olives and the capers to a suitable size and all was good.

Chopping tiny capers, not so easy. They
roll around.

I still had some cilantro left in the fridge, it seems to last a lot longer than other herbs, so I was able to use it in many dishes recently.

Looking fresh as ever. The wonder herb!

Okay, so I had a bunch of great ingredients ready.  Now what?  Well, I love Israeli cous cous, so when I saw this grains blend at Trader Joe's, I was intrigued.  (What was the blend part anyway, I wondered?)

I enjoy combo things. A bit of this, a bit of that.

It also had orzo, garbanzos, spilt yellow peas and red quinoa. Mostly cous cous though.

Yea, variety!

I cooked it per the instructions, being careful not to over cook and make it mushy because I wanted to be able to toss it around with my other ingredients and not have it turn it into a sticky paste.

Actually, it was pretty just as is.

Though, what fun is cous cous if you don't add things to it to liven it up?  So I added the olives, capers, tomatoes, olive oil, salt, cilantro and tossed it about.

Wow, look at all the colors.

Finishing touch: cheese.  Feta will give it creaminess as well as a bit of additional saltiness.

I bought it in a block in liquid and crumbled it.
It was a softer, fresher version than I
normally purchase and I liked it.

One light toss as to not break up the feta too much and there was nothing else to do but put it in a dish and consume.  Just slightly warm - the ideal temperature for flavor travel.

Red, yellow, green, white, purple, a
crazy rainbow of color!

I like how so many things are going on in this salad.  It has sweet, it has salty, it has fresh, it has dried, it has cheesy, it has chewy.  Now that is one complex side dish, without being complicated.

Fork please!

So the harvest blend was a great idea!  Uh, but wait.  Maybe I would have liked this made with quinoa instead?  (There's just no pleasing me some days.)

I mixed red and regular quinoa together.
I can't say yet if they taste different.

I boiled up some quinoa in water and not in chicken broth this time, because I did'nt want the flavors to compete with the other ingredients.

About the same as regular quinoa.

I used the exact same measurements as earlier, only I used one cup of cooked quinoa this time instead of the harvest blend.

So same dish, only with the quinoa instead.

I put some of this one in a small bowl as well and did a side by side comparison.  This method hearkens back to my Art History class days when our (ridiculously long) tests always involved comparing and contrasting (in excruciating detail) wonders like the Parthenon and the Pantheon.  I could hardly remember what the differences were on test day because my brain was so jammed up with gobs of historical information and architectural terminology!  (Oh yes, I'll flying buttress you!)

Similar, yet different. A tricky evaluation
indeed! Where are my notes?

Well, I liked both of them.  They weren't exactly the same, for certain.  The quinoa definitely had a distinct nutty flavor, whereas the harvest grains blend carried an unoffensive pasta bite with a light hint of bean from the other elements.  Hmmm.  I kept taking a bite of one than the other.  Flip flopping my opinion.  But in the end, I had to choose the harvest grains blend as the preferred of the two and clear winner in this case.  I felt the pasta lent itself slightly better to the other ingredients than the quinoa because it didn't compete with them.  Olives and sundried tomatoes are so robust that not a lot of other strong flavors are welcome to vie for attention.

Comments in closing, I don't regret making the effort to give both variations a shot because you just never know which one you may prefer until you're tasting them in succession of one another.  Making small batches affords the opportunity to try things different ways, take notes and make informed decisions of your preferences.  I guess school (and REALLY difficult teachers who give IMPOSSIBLY challenging exams that you BARELY have any hope of passing EVEN when you study your VERY hardest for DAYS on end!!) can teach you some handy things after all.