Quinoa Stew with Potatoes, Spinach, and Chard

My first-ever attempt at soup was a SUCCESS! We decided we wanted to try Quinoa Stew with Potatoes, Spinach, and Chard, so I armed myself with a shopping list and we went shopping. Three grocery stores later (chard is a hard green to find, apparently) I was ready to go! Here are all the ingredients that made this stew so yummy.

Once we got home, I read over the recipe and saw that it really only had to be on the stovetop for about 35 minutes or so, so I asked my hungry husband what time he wanted to eat. He said 7 or 8 sounded good, and with it being only about 5 I thought I had plenty of time. At around 5:45 I decided to begin chopping, figuring it wouldn't hurt to have everything chopped a little bit earlier than needed. Who wants to guess how long it took me to chop all of the items pictured below?

That's 8 oz. of gold potatoes, 4 oz. of sweet potatoes, 4 oz. of green onions, 6 oz. of spinach, 3.5 oz. of chard, 1 cup of cilantro, and 1 clove of garlic. While I'm not going to fully disclose how long it took me to chop, and while there were some other parts of the soup-making process that did take awhile, I will tell you that we sat down to eat well after 9 PM. I need to practice chopping faster, for sure.

After everything was chopped, it was time to cook the quinoa. After the quinoa was fully cooked, I was supposed to drain the quinoa using a sieve, and save the water it had cooked in separately. We don't have a sieve, so we became geniuses and put a large bowl under a colander, then put a flour sack over the colander to catch the quinoa. This worked just fine; however, we needed all four hands and I wasn't able to capture our amazing draining abilities. Quinoa, ready and waiting.

After that, it was time to cook the garlic, then add the cumin, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and salt and let it cook for a few minutes.

Then I added all the other veggies, the quinoa liquid, and the other ingredients and spices and let it simmer for awhile longer.

Hooray! The hard work is done! The recipe said to put feta cheese on top as a garnish, but I'm not really a huge fan of feta and Jon is completely ANTI-feta, so he suggested we use Queso Fresco. Here he is, chopping. I think he was afraid to give me the knife again. He wanted to eat NOW.

We also garnished with some extra cilantro. Here is the soup, finally ready to eat.

WOW! This soup was SO DELICIOUS. It tasted even better a day or two later. We both agreed that it was definitely worth the wait I put us through, but I think next time I make soup, I will start around noon!