Quinoa Stuffing with a Cashew Cranberry Sauce

Good morning! Last night I shared a sneak peek of today’s recipe on my instagram, I was too excited to share this Quinoa Stuffing with a Cashew Cranberry Sauce – YUM! This recipe has a funny story and came up out of nothing ha but turned out to be one of my favorites yet – isn’t that how it always works out?!

Yesterday I planned to wake up early, work out, get to the grocery store (we are running low on so many things), then create a recipe (for today) and work on all things blogging. Well that definitely did not happen! I went into blogger panic attack mode yesterday morning. When I first wake up, I drink my lemon water, E3Live and pour a cup of coffee, then sit down and make sure everything is well with my blog. I’m not sure what I was thinking but I guess I did something you are not supposed to do… for months now I’ve been having problems with all of the related posts plugins that appear after each post to offer similar posts for the reader – and NONE of them have been working. I’ve tried them all – so I started reading more into it and found that I had to add a code snippet into one of my files for this certain plugin (that I really wanted) to work. I know absolutely nothing about coding but it seemed to work for everyone else so I thought to give it a try… I paste the coding into my functions file as I have done before with other snippets (and maybe some of you are shaking your heads right now haha) clicked save and everything went BLANK. Oh.My.God. My site was gone. I really messed up big time. Cue the blogger panic attack mode! 

I got in touch with my host and of course my style sheet and template weren’t matching because I wasn’t supposed to do what I did – the tech guy said I can no longer use my template until it is fixed…. %^&%$##$^&* ugh!!!!! The girl that I bought the template from has fallen off the face of the Earth and never responds to me so yea… this was all my fault and I started kicking myself/shed a few tears but I like to think it was a good thing because I was having lots of problems with that template anyway and if I ever needed help – she was never around. I need friends who know coding – any recommendations?!

So my entire day yesterday was devoted to finding/purchasing a legit template and completely re-vamping my site, which I did not intend to do. You may have noticed it throughout the day if you were on my blog so I’m sorry about that! Finally around 3pm I settled most of the issues (except for my header and a few other things that need to be customized) but I was running out of time for a recipe to post today and running out of daylight to shoot pictures – plus we hardly had any food!! 

This recipe was born out of creativity at it’s finest. I pulled out everything I had in the fridge which was a few carrots, a small amount of cranberries and green onion, which somehow turned into this amazing Quinoa Stuffing with a Cashew Cranberry Sauce. It is so delicious I can’t even tell you! I guess I had all the right ingredients for a plant-based vegan stuffing recipe – raisins, pumpkin seeds, cranberries, and enough to make a creamy sauce that enhances all the flavors. I also had half of a beet leftover so I thought to boil the quinoa with beet juice to add beautiful color to the dish. 

I’m really happy with how this stuffing recipe turned out and I can’t wait for you to try it! Plus the Cashew Cranberry Sauce turns out to be this pretty and vibrant pink color 🙂

Quinoa Stuffing with a Cashew Cranberry Sauce

• Prep Time: 15
• Cook Time: 20
• Total Time: 35

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Ingredients

• 1/2 of a small beet + 1 cup water
• 1 cup quinoa
• 1 cup cranberries + 1 cup water
• 1 cup carrots, chopped
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 1/4 cup pumpkin seeds (pepita seeds)
• 2 green onions, chopped

Cashew Cranberry Sauce

• remaining cranberries and liquid (see directions)
• 1/2 cup raw cashews
• juice from 1/2 of a lemon
• 2 tablespoons maple syrup
• pinch of sea salt

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Instructions

1. In a blender, combine 1/2 of a beet with 1 cup water and blend until smooth. You can strain the liquid through a strainer if needed. Add the liquid to a pot with an additional 1 cup of water and 1 cup of quinoa. Cook quinoa according to directions.
2. In a separate pot, combine 1 cup of cranberries with 1 cup of water and bring to a boil. Then lower heat and simmer for about 10 minutes. Once the cranberries are soft, remove 1/2 cup of the cranberries from the pot and set aside in a small bowl. Transfer the remaining liquid and cranberries to a blender (do not drain liquid!) Add the rest of the ingredients for the Cashew Cranberry Sauce to the blender and blend until smooth (adding water if needed).
3. Combine the cooked quinoa, remaining 1/2 cup of cooked cranberries, carrots, raisins, pumpkin seeds and green onions in a large bowl. Pour the Cashew Cranberry Sauce over top and mix until well combined.
4. Enjoy!!

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Notes

• Cooking the quinoa in the “beet” juice is completely optional but adds a beautiful color!
• I did not cook the carrots and left them raw but you can cook them to your liking.

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 Have you ever had a major blogging fail like I did? If you have, then you know what the blogger panic attack mode feels like haha.. When my site is down, I am not a normal person and will do everything I can to fix it in the fastest way possible. Thank you for understanding!! Hopefully everything will be better and back to normal in the next few days 🙂 do you like the new look of my blog (besides my header that still needs to be fixed)? Let me know!