Quinoa (or bulghur wheat) with parsley and pine nuts - it's a classic, apparently

"Serve this hot or cold – it's a take on the classic pasta dish with the same ingredients," writes Mark Hix in the Independent describing one of his recipes I cooked up this week.

Ahhh, that classic pasta dish. So classic, I've never heard of it. Anyway, I assume it's a pasta dish with raisins and pine nuts, because that's what this is. Except there's no pasta; the pasta has magically become quinoa. With me so far?

Anyway, you know the drill: I had the recipe for a while (since August last year in this case), it was taking up room in my recipes-to-make folder, and it handily featured store cupboard ingredients, allowing me to make progress on two New Year's resolutions in one go.

The recipe's a pretty easy one - boil up some quinoa, add onion and broccoli while it's cooking, then raisins, oil, parsley, chives and pine nuts once it's cooked. The recipe's here if you want to give it a go.

So that's just what I did. Except I used mainly bulghur wheat with some quinoa mixed in, as that's what I had in my store cupboard.

The results looked a little something like this:

I think I should get bonus points for preserving a Mark Hix vegan recipe for posterity. The geezer almost never cooks vegetarian stuff, let alone vegan recipes. He's the type of chef that would put steak in a fruit salad if he thought he could get away with it.

Still, the dish was perfectly edible (which is handy given it makes a metric truckload, and so I'll be taking this to work for lunch) but it didn't rock my world. It was a bit one-dimensional - it tasted like it was lacking something. 

Pasta, maybe?