"Oh come to Mama, yummy little quinoa cakes!"

Quinoa – a grain not much bigger than a sesame seed but a nutritional giant, is adored by the hemp and tie-dyed wearing health-food worshippers like myself. Except that these days, I'm not hippie-looking not unless 'hippy' is meant to imply 'big Mama hips', then, why yes, that certainly would be me.

My love affair with quinoa started about 3 years ago when my hubs first went vegan. Since cutting back on meat in his diet, I’d started increasing or bringing in other nutritional heavyweights to his plate. If my hubs hadn’t brought quinoa to my attention, I wouldn’t have discovered it until maybe, much later when scientific studies all commanded us to eat more of it like the way they did with salmon. But even so, I didn’t really know how best to include quinoa into our diet besides adding it into our brown rice staple. A terribly boring addition. Sure, I’d seen recipes for quinoa salad that looked interesting enough but it didn’t grab my attention.

But on my recent trip to NYC, I had a quinoa epiphany earth moving enough for me to lock my taste buds to remembering the texture and flavours of that one bite of Evonne's quinoa pattie. It was Evonne who’d bought that one delightful quinoa pattie from my once favoured grocery shop -- Whole Foods -- where I'd often frequented in Houston but never again step foot into since moving to upstate NY. And it was also Evonne who insisted that I had to try some -- as if her disturbing moans between bites didn’t already confirm my suspicions that it really was that yummy.

And it was.

The quinoa pattie wasn't fancy. It didn't call for ingredients like white truffles or belugar caviar. In fact, it was made up of flakes of vegetables, like the humble carrot, iron-rich spinach and the unassuming onion. All of which, were already in my vegetable crisper (well, bar the onions, of course). And I'm certain, one could throw in any vegetable they had on hand if neither carrots nor spinach was available. The idea of cooking foods that call for hard-to-find ingredients is possibly most busy moms' nightmare. That’s why I can never replicate a good bowl of laksa without the essential laksa leaf which makes it unique and authentic, and not just noodles in common coconut curry.

So, the other night, I took out my container of quinoa, cooked 2 cups worth in vegetable broth and waited until they puffed up like bloated, brown and transparent tadpoles before leaving them out to cool. I also threw in some finely diced onions and had my usual seasoning suspects like garlic powder, veg-it and dill mixed in. Then, a grated carrot was added and a bunch of chopped up baby spinach leaves. Sun dried tomatoes went into the mix too because I was trying to rid a largish container with no more than 5 measly pieces in too-much-olive-oil. Time to use up all those I thought.

Since I was going to make these patties vegan, I couldn’t use eggs to bind the grains and vegetables. I ended up using the dejected-looking box of egg replacer in my pantry that I kept handy, incase I needed it for vegan recipes like this. Adding one egg equivalent to the mixture wasn’t enough to hold the patties in shape. I ended up having to add three eggs equivalent of egg replacer before the patties stood the no-crumble test. Perhaps two eggs replacer would have sufficed but the fastidious in me, didn’t like the slightly misshapen look of the patties after taking them out of the pie mould.

The patties were grilled on a well oiled griddle at 400 deg Fahrenheit for a few minutes on both sides until they browned and looked model gorgeous. I tried one right off the griddle, and it was mind-blowingly yummy that I scarfed one whole pattie right there on the spot.

Needless to say, it was that good.