This is a little dish I came up with the other night that turned out really well, very hearty and filling. While not vegetarian, it is very light on meat and has just enough meat "essence" to make it rich and full of flavor without breaking the budget.
Start by slicing up some onions and green peppers, about one medium-large onion and a whole pepper. Onions here can be whatever you have on hand, but I used yellow onion. Heat up a skillet and add a few pieces of bacon or pork fat, maybe about two bacon slices worth and fry until the bacon has rendered a lot of its fat into the skillet. Now add the onions and peppers to the hot bacon and grease and fry them until the onions are translucent. Now add a couple cloves of minced garlic and 4-5 sliced mushrooms (I just used the white button kind, but portobellas would be fine too) and stir these in the heat for a couple of minutes until the mushrooms are somewhat softened and before the garlic burns.
Now the fun part! We're going to boil our quinoa with this mixture so that it will pick up all the lovely flavors we've just made, rather than making it in a separate pot and adding it later. This will also make for fewer dishes to wash afterwards!
Get a cup or so of your dry quinoa and rinse it in a sieve or mesh colander, stirring the grains with your hands under the running water to help remove the bitter saponin layer that coats each quinoa grain. Once drained, dump the quinoa into your pan of simmering vegetables and add two or so cups of water, enough to just submerge the quinoa. Turn the heat down low and keep stirring until the quinoa has absorbed all the water.
The final touch to this dish is tomato pureé. If you don't have that, you can also use tomato paste, but just add some extra water as you stir it in. Just add a few tablespoon fulls of whichever tomato product you have on hand, enough to create a thick sauce but not heavy tomato sauce like marinara.
Feel free to add salt, pepper and whatever herbs of your choice like basil, oregano, etc. for extra flavor. I also added some fish sauce at the end to punch up the meaty flavor profile and it did not disappoint. This is a great dish for experimenting with all kinds of additions and you could use other seasonings instead of Italian ones such as curry for an Indian feel or ginger and sesame oil for a more Asian flavor.
Enjoy! This also makes great leftovers!