Quinoa Patties

I bookmarked this recipe from 101cookbooks.com soon after making salmon sweet potato pancakes.  It seemed along the same lines and used one of those good grains I am trying to use more of.  Then I cooked up some quinoa and got some of the ingredients so was committed.  I don’t usually cook with chives or dill and don’t especially like dill so I ended up getting parsley and basil instead.  Then after another review I wasn’t sure about basil with feta.  I ended up halving the recipe and making it with parsley only.  Half way through I added basil just to see how it worked.  As suggested in the recipe the patties didn’t hold up too well while I was forming them but to be honest I couldn’t figure out if they needed more dry bread crumbs or more wet egg.  On reflection they might have needed more quinoa because there was a lot of other stuff in there; I don’t think anyone can make a patty out of a pile of greens. 

Even though the patties were hard to form they cooked up great and kept their shape.  I enjoyed the patties and ate all of them but can’t say I was overly impressed with them.  I don’t know if it was my switching up the herbs or what but it just didn’t wow me.  But, as I type this up I realized I did eat all of them and they were tasty so I guess a decent snack to try.  One issue was the feta, warm I didn’t like it at all and cool it was jarring to the rest of the ingredients.  That is probably from me switching up the herbs.

For some reason while I was making these I kept thinking of eggplant parmesan (probably the basil) so here’s what I want to do next time.  Skip the feta and use mozzarella, maybe even a little bit of ricotta.  Use the basil and parsley again and the kale.   Then you have a healthyish snack with the delicious flavors of chicken or eggplant parm.  I would serve them with homemade marinara sauce for dipping. 

Here’s the original recipe from 101cookbooks: http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/baked-quinoa-patties-recipe.html

Ok, I just reread Heidi’s post on 101cookbooks and she made these for a flight. I’m pretty wowed now, because I could definitely snack my way through these on a long flight. Hmm, I’m headed back east next week so may try this again sooner than I had anticipated.