Recipe: Curried millet

Recipe - Curried millet

Millet is a fantastic wholegrain to include as part of your healthy diet. It´s packed full of vitamins and minerals, including many B-vitamins, calcium, magnesium and its also high in fibre. One of the major benefits is that millet doesn´t cost very much and it really does fill you up, so it’s a great grain to include in your diet if you are watching your pennies (or cents) this February.

When you consume millet, it releases energy slowly into your body. This means that you keep going for longer and will avoid any mid-afternoon slumps in energy that you might experience after eating a sandwich or pasta, for example.

The addition of curry powder to this recipe brings a gentle heat – you choose the type of curry powder you want to add. If you want a little more spicy heat, you could also add half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper, to suit your taste buds. The orange zest gives it a lovely zing!

In the recipe instructions below, we say “water fry” the onions and carrots. By this we mean that you add water into your frying pan, instead of oil, then add the vegetables and cook. There is no need to use any oil. You need to remain vigilant – keep adding another tablespoon or two of water as necessary to prevent the vegetables sticking to the pan, and use a wooden spoon to keep the veggies moving. We use this method to reduce the amount of oil used in our food. This reduces the amount of calories in your food (one tablespoon of olive or sunflower oil is around 135 calories). Additionally oil becomes unstable when it is heated, meaning that many of the health benefits are lost, so we prefer to use our oil in its natural form, unheated, in salad dressings. That way your body will get all the vitamins, minerals and essential fats that olive oil contains.

This recipe can be served hot or cold – the instructions below explain how you can do either.

You could serve this dish with our tofu kebabs or veggie bean burgers.

Serves: 4
Calories: 1455 total, 364 per serving (salad is 1725 total, 431 per serving)

Ingredients

1 cup of uncooked millet
1 tsp curry powder
1 onion, chopped finely
¾ cup of small diced carrots
Zest of one orange
1/2 cup chopped black olives
2 tbsp chopped toasted sliced almonds
2 tbsp raisins
1 tbsp lemon juice
¼ cup chopped parsley
For the salad: 2 tbsp olive oil

Method

First we want to toast the millet. So take a saucepan and place it over a medium heat. Add the millet to the saucepan and toast it for around 3 minutes, stirring regularly with a wooden spoon. You are looking for the millet to start changing colour – so it starts to become golden brown. You will also smell a lovely toasted smell, which resembles the smell of popcorn!

Next, add 2 ½ cups of water into the millet saucepan, then add the curry powder. Bring the water it to a boil, then turn the heat down and simmer covered for 20 minutes. Stir occasionally. The millet is cooked when the grains appear larger in size, and you want there to be a slight firmness (bite) to the millet. Once it is cooked, stir the grains. If you are serving hot, add the remaining ingredients. If serving cold (as curried millet salad), remove the lid, stir again and place to one side to let the millet cool down.

While the millet is cooking, water fry the onions in a frying pan until they start to soften, (about 7 minutes). Add the carrots and a little more water and shallow simmer for another 10 minutes until all the water is evaporated – you can add more water if necessary. The carrots should remain bright and slightly crunchy. If making curried millet salad, remove the carrots and onions from the pan and allow to cool.

  • For the hot curried millet:
    Combine the millet and the carrots into the millet pan. Add in the remaining ingredients: orange zest, olives, almonds, raisins, lemon juice and parsley. Serve immediately.
  • For the curried millet salad:
    Combine the cold millet in a bowl place with the cooled vegetables. Add the orange zest, olives, almonds, raisins, lemon juice and parsley, and pour over the olive oil. Stir well to combine.

More information

Read our earlier article “All about millet” or search the blog page for more recipe ideas.  We include millet as part of our natural plant-based menus, a few times each week.

Download curried millet recipe PDF

Click here to download your PDF of this recipe: Curried millet recipe from La Crisalida Retreats.

About the author

Lisa
Lisa
Lisa is one of the founders of La Crisalida Retreats. She is an Epidemiologist, therapeutic hatha and yin yoga teacher and also teaches mindfulness meditation. Lisa has studied NLP and hypnosis, as well as nutrition (she designs the menus).