How to Cook Millet

It’s nice to give quinoa and oats a break. I found out about freekeh and it’s tasty to make (and fun to say!). If you don’t have to travel far and don’t mind toting around a cooler, why not vegan ice cream? Always sure to impress: “wow, homemade ice cream that’s vegan!”

YUM! I’ve never tried millet before, but ever since I was diagnosed with celiac disease, I’ve been on the lookout for alternative hot cereals to try (I can’t do oats, even if they are gluten free). Millet looks absolutely delicious – thanks for the recipe, and I can’t wait to try it out! Right now, I’m loving quinoa. Particularly, overnight quinoa flakes! YUM!

http://caseythecollegeceliac.blogspot.com/2014/06/overnight-quinoa-flakes.html

My favourtite potluck item are dips! Spinach, roasted red pepper, hummus…. These all make vegetables easier to eat!

Also smoked salmon… However I don’t think there is a vegetarian/vegan alternative.

Millet… ah that brings back memories. The summer after my sophomore year in college (about 1990), instead of going back to my parents’ house I shared a house with my boyfriend and a few other couples. I was out of work due to knee surgery and so the others paid my share of the rent in exchange for cooking for everyone, and since most of the gang were vegetarians we kept a vegetarian table. Millet, even organic, was dirt cheap from the bulk bins at the local health-food store because demand for it was very low – it was cheaper than rice or oatmeal so we ate a LOT of millet! The most popular things were a casserole of millet baked with tomatoes, garlic, and cheese (vegans could use something like Daiya), and a baked rice pudding with millet (millet is naturally slightly sweet tasting so it is well suited to that). Toasting it until lightly browned in a dry skillet before cooking gives it a lovely nutty flavor but be sure to use lowish heat because it can pop like popcorn and go everywhere!

As far as sweets for potlucks go, what I bring tends to be determined these days by the dominant food allergies of the group attending (sigh…). I usually default to gluten-, soy-, peanut- and refined-sugar-free nowadays, nut-free if anyone has severe reactions because of potential cross-contamination – your rice crispy treats tend to go over really well (I like One Degree Organics’ sprouted brown rice-crisp cereal) especially with mini chocolate chips or dried wild blueberries. If nuts are an issue I use Sunbutter. If I know I definitely do not have to worry about nut allergies, a big tray with a selection of different flavors of the Fudge Babies/Larabars is fun. I portion them with a little scoop like a melon baller so they’re balls maybe 3/4″ across and call them “fruit truffles”. I make my life easier by processing a lot of nuts into a coarse meal consistency beforehand and dumping it into a big bowl (usually a mixture of whatever nuts I have on hand: walnuts, Brazil nuts – most of us need the selenium – hazelnuts, supplemented with almond meal and cashew meal from Trader Joe’s) and using that for the nut part, instead of doing up each batch individually from square one. I grind the fruit portion and add nut meal until the consistency is right, dump the resulting “dough” in a bowl, cover and label it, then I roll them all at once. Disposable vinyl gloves make this a much more pleasant task! Some flavors get additional nuts that are a bit more coarsely chopped and usually toasted, and I usually roll the ball in the chopped nuts: like blueberry-lemon generally gets pecans, banana balls (Trader Joe’s “Just Bananas, Flattened” are the bomb for those) get walnuts or macadamias, apricot balls (usually with orange-flower water or rosewater – think Middle Eastern food) get chopped pistachios. A local cake decorating store has candy papers in different colors, and I use the colors to color-code the flavors; I make a little placard to put next to the tray that shows what color holds what flavor, and the ingredients for each (with all the food allergies out there now, it’s just polite to disclose the ingredients). It sounds like a massive time suck but done assembly-line style actually takes less time than making a pie from scratch, and when the balls are small people can take half a dozen flavors and not look (or feel) like they’re massively oinking out. LOL And of course you know how well they store, they could be made two weeks ahead of time and stored tightly sealed in the refrigerator (the papers tend to wilt so just mark your containers with the different flavors, then drop the truffles into the papers as you’re making up the tray(s) to take to the party… side hint, hit up a florist shop for some of that fancy patterned foil they use for covering plant pots and use that to cover yard-sale cookie sheets. Tah-dah, “fancy” serving trays you won’t worry about losing!).

Cupcakes baked in mini muffin tins would be fun too – maybe mini strawberry-shortcake cupcakes: a white or yellow cake cupcake scooped out with a melon baller and filled with your vegan whipped cream, with a whole hulled strawberry stuck point-up right in the middle. (Make a trifle with the scooped-out cake bits.) Fruit-filled summer rolls (the kind in the rice-paper wrapper) have been making the rounds of Pinterest and various blogs, and since it’s getting hot those would be a nice fresh-tasting sweet, as would crisp little tartlets made from baking wonton wrappers in mini muffin tins, filled with a pastry cream and finely-chopped fruit almost like an all-fruit salsa, perhaps with a drizzle of white chocolate or sprinkle of toasted coconut (especially if your pastry cream is based on coconut milk) – all the components could be made ahead and then just bang them together at the last minute so they don’t get soggy. I like things that are pre-portioned for potlucks and buffets because serving utensils get all mucky and often cross-contaminated, and things run out because some people take a big portion, and I also like for those portions to be small so that one can try a whole bunch of things. And finger food is just plain fun. 😀

Yay, I guessed! And yay for miller – such a nutritional powerhouse for a grain with an amazingly fluffy texture and yummy kind of buttery taste. Must give this recipe a go, never tried miller porridge before and those protein/fiber numbers seem excellent! Though I would starve after eating only 166 calories for breakie, so hefty toppings are needed 🙂

I have a question about the millet breakfast bowl recipe. How did you get 166 calories per serving? When I run the figures using 1 cup unsweetened coconut milk and 1 cup water for the liquids and Nectresse for the sweetener, I get 218 per 305.7g (10.8oz) serving. Any idea where the estes calories come from?

Love your stuff!