Agrainst all odds

Vegetable buckwheat with mâche and red bean salad

This time around we prepared a vegetable buckotto (very fancy culinary talk for a risotto made from buckwheat groats rather than rice. It's a thing, really! Or at least now it is) along with a salad made from leafy mâche - one of its many common names in English, others include “corn salad”and “rapunzel”. Valerianella locusta is its proper Latin name - and kidney beans.

To begin, we pan fried our vegetables up in some olive oil. We chose to use onions, carrots, zucchini, and peppers, though really you can add whatever you would like to this versatile dish. After a few minutes on the stove, we added buckwheat groats and unsalted peanuts, fried for a few more minutes and added water (2 parts of water per 1 part of groats). We added some salt to this, but otherwise no other spices; buckwheat has a gentle and characteristic aroma and flavour, and it would be a shame to drown this out with spices.

Buckwheat cooks up a lot like rice, and once the excess water has been absorbed you can remove it from the heat and allow it to sit for a while. If you're feeling fancy, you could garnish with some shaved carrot (who are we to step on your creativity?).

While the other components are on the stove you can get to work on your salad. We chose to use mâche, fresh from the garden; really any green will do though (try to aim for nutritious greens like kale or spinach rather than less nutritious leafy vegetables like iceberg lettuce). We then added canned kidney beans (you can also use dry beans but you will need to hydrate and cook them) and seasoned the salad with some pumpkin oil. Once this is ready you're all set to serve up and enjoy!

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Let's talk numbers

The price for our meal came out to just under € 4, so once more less than € 1 per person. It helped that we used greens from the garden in this case, otherwise the price would have been around € 1.33 per person; even if you don't have space or time for a garden, a few pots on your stairs or in a sunny window can be a great place to grow some simple greens that will keep giving and giving all summer long (this can also be a fun activity for kids and a great way of teaching them about plants as well as getting them involved around the house; for those of us without children, our inner kid certainly can't say no to playing in the dirt a bit either).

For those of you doing the math at home alongside us, where do you think the buckwheat fell on our cost scale?

It turns out buckwheat was in 4th place in terms of price, and with the energy contribution it brings to your meal it is an absolute winner!

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If you've been reading our other posts, you probably noticed that we measure our portions so that the entire lunch covers about 1/4th of the daily energy needs of an average person. That being said, not many of us actually align with the average, so feel free to adjust based on your own needs. What is really important in our calculations are the ratios between nutrients, and the ratios do not change with the portion size (2 parts water and 1 part juice will taste the same whether you have 100ml or 1L of it, and the concentrations of sugar and vitamin C will be the same).

Let's see if this lunch managed to get us to 25% of our nutrient needs. In terms of nutritional value, we covered 32% of our protein requirements. Buckwheat and peanuts gave us 6g of protein while the beans in the salad contributed 3g. So we even managed to surpass our goal for this. Similarly, all of our macronutrient needs were exceeded, including lipids and each type of amino acid. That being said, we were a bit short on minerals today. We only met 12% of our calcium needs and 16% of our selenium needs. These deficits are easily accounted for in other foods, and if you eat a varied diet your next meal can easily make up for this. If you read our previous recipe (link), tofu, cabbage, and polenta in our lunch gave us 40% of our daily requirements for these minerals.

In terms of vitamins, we also did quite well. We were short on vitamins B12 and D as these can indeed be tricky to get on a vegan diet. A glass of fortified soy milk could do a lot to help this, as well as our mineral shortage we just talked about.

This lunch had no wheat or other gluten-containing cereals and thus is also appropriate for people unable to eat gluten.

For more information about our calculations, feel free to click on The nutritional values table.

Have a nice sunny day, everyone!

PS: if you have any questions about today's lunch, the nutritional values, or have ideas for

future lunches, feel free to get in touch with us at hungry.pumpkin@gmail.com.

The Hungry Pumpkin Team