A Quinoa Recipe for Fresh Summer Corn: Definitely a “Keeper”!

When sweet corn is in season — as it is right now — we eat a lot of it.Usually, we are corn purists: just boil it quickly, sprinkle it with salt or Campmix, and eat it right off the cob.  Yesterday, though, I wanted to try something different with our sweet corn, fresh from Busa’s Farm.(In the Robbins garden, the corn in our Three Sisters plot is a decorative popping corn so we can’t use it for this recipe.) With the corn, I bought a bunch of gigantic, freshly picked scallions, also grown at Busa’s.

The recipe, Quinoa and Fresh Corn with Scallions is from Deborah Madison‘s “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone”.(Highly recommended book, by the way!) A photo of Deborah’s recipe is shown, but I varied it slightly. I used more vegetables: 5 ears of corn and 3 of the huge scallions. Instead of the Tbsp butter or canola oil, I used 3 Tbsp Extra Virgin olive oil and 1 tsp butter. I also sauteed the corn and scallions longer than the recipe recommends, til the scallions were wilted. I used an organic tricolor quinoa from Trader Joes. I thought this would be good, but didn’t think it would be SO good. John (who is really into corn in its “purist” preparation and also does not get very excited about some of the grains I like) loved it! We didn’t even add the cheese that the recipe suggests — it was delicious all by itself, seasoned with salt and pepper. We had it as a side dish with grilled fish. By the way, the beautiful bowl in the photos was made by my friend Amy Goldstein, at Mudflat Studio.