Super Natural Cooking

It was a chilly, rainy night and I wanted to make something easy and warm for dinner.  We’ve been overloaded with oranges in our recent organic produce delivery (Thank you Organics@home!) and earlier in the week I had picked up all the ingredients for this and a couple other recipes from the book.

I got all the ingredients out and started chopping and sautéing the onion, shallots, and garlic.  The recipe says to heat the butter, but it calls for olive oil in the list of ingredients.  I used oil, but I’m sure butter would be good too.  The barley gets added to the sautéed onion, shallots and garlic.  Followed by the wine, and then all the water, a cup at a time.  While stirring and simmering the barley, I got the rest of the ingredients ready; chopped, measured, zested and grated.  Watch for orange seeds – mine had so many!

The barley took about 45 minutes to soften.  Once it was ready, everything except for the walnuts were stirred in.  I probably used twice as much arugula because I usually try to sneak in extra veggies and this was an easy place to do it.  Greens like these will wilt down nicely and they are really good for you – lots of vitamin A, vitamin C and calcium.  Chard or spinach would have also been good here or maybe even a combination.  That’s what I’ll do next time.

Topped with toasted walnuts, photographed and served.  Mine looked more creamy than the picture in the book.  The recipe made four main-dish sized servings, though next time I would serve as a side dish so it would easily serve 6.  My partner’s first impression was “Oatmeal for dinner!?”  Yes, it looks just like oatmeal, with chopped flecks of green.  Oh well.  It tasted great.  I’m pretty picky about citrus flavour in foods – especially orange – but this was really good.  In the recipe, she suggests grapefruit, tangerines and tangelos as other options.  The toasted walnuts were tasty and added a nice crunch.  Other nuts would be good too… maybe pine nuts with goat cheese instead of the sour cream that was called for.  Could also add some tarragon or oregano.

This would also be delicious with a mild blue cheese, sliced pear and toasted walnuts.  I’ve made delicious appetizers with that combo before on baguette slices.

Plenty of ways to add more variety to this recipe.  I really like that.  I have limited experience with barley, so I was happy to learn a new way to cook it and I really liked the texture in the risotto.  It was delicious the next day for lunch too!