Hot Quinoa

This is my kind of food: chop'n'fry! You basically just chop up things and add them to a hot frying pan as you go along. At the end you mix in something like quinoa, bulgur or couscous, and your done! Make sure you get something spicy and something sweet in there, and you don't have to worry too much about the other flavors.

So, today I am having (as I'm typing actually) a hot quinoa based chop'n'fry. For this particular one you need:
1 Onion
1 Eggplant (I had a rather small one)
~100g Chorizo (spicy)
1 Bell Pepper (I used a small yellow one)
8 dried Apricots
4 servings of Quinoa
Salt
butter/oil (or both) to fry in

Start by setting the quinoa cooking (follow the instructions on your particular package) and heat a large frying pan with butter. Now, the order in which you chop the foods will be the order in which they land in the pan, so it's important to do this right! Start with the onion and then the eggplant—chop up and toss in the pan. Make sure there's enough fat in the pan, the eggplant can suck up quite a lot. Next the chorizo, which contains some fat that will mix nicely in with the rest. Add the bell pepper which will also add some juices, keeping the pan from drying up. Last but not least chop'n'toss the dried apricots, which will suck up any excess moist. Make sure you stir the content of the pan every now and then during the above procedure. When the quinoa is done (mine took ~15 minutes, which is just about right), toss it into the pan with the rest. Let them all have some bonding time, and introduce them to whatever amount of salt you see fit. Enjoy!

The eggplant get a really mild, sweet taste and a soft and moist feel—sometimes iterrupted by the spiciness of the chorizo, sometimes overrun by the sweetness of the apricots. The quinoa makes you full, and onion and bell peppers seem to work with just about anything that touches a frying pan. Perfect!

Oh, and if you want some crunch, feel free to chop up some peanuts, cashews or pine nuts and add at the end—it goes really great with the rest.