Millet with baked pumpkin salad

Millet with baked pumpkin salad with a sunflower seed dressing

I think millets are a healthy substitute for wheat or rice. Since sunny boy can't eat wheat and co., including rye and barley, I try to offer him different types of other cereals. Millets are called Hirse in German and this is a variety called gold hirse here and comes from China, with big sized kernels. These are large in size than the Indian 'sama ke chawal' a hindi word for a variety of millet which you might know usually eaten during fasting. 'Sama ke chawal' are also different in being white in colour than this variety I used.

yellow chinese variety of millet (DE: 'gold hirse')

I took the recipe of baked pumpkin salad from 101 cookbooks, a blog surely well known to you all. I made a slightly different version than as given in the recipe. I used cooked broccoli florets which were still slightly crisp and I cooked them in the same water as the millets and took them out once done. I roasted a handfull of leftover sweetened cranberries and added them to the salad and also canned corn kernels to the plate while serving. I didn't have cilantro (coriander leaves) so I used parsely instead. Apart from that I had to slightly vary the amounts of the sunflower seeds and also pumpkin seeds I added to the dressing in the dressing as I didn't get it right initially but at the end it was a fanastic change to the vinaigrettes I usually make as dressings.

Some notable nutritional aspects of the meal:

Millets: contain B vitamins just like wheat ( see link (Wiki) ), and many other trace minerals required by our body and that way make for a good replacement for wheat

Broccoli : Apart from the many vitamins it also contains the trace element selenium and many other substances suggested to be having anticancer properties (source: Wiki). contains dietery fibres.

sunflower seeds : these are not only a good source of healthy fatty acids from the oil but also proteins. It contains linoleic acid, an omega-6-fatty acid. Like most of the seeds it also contains many useful trace minerals.

Pumpkin: good source of dietery fibres, just like broccoli, and contains a good number of trace minerals and vitamins. Low in fats but contains small amounts of proteins (lower than in potato)


The roasted flavour of the pumpkin was lovely. Since I used hokkaido variety I didn't need to peel it. I made the mistake of cutting the onion into wedges but forgot to take it out in time and they got a bit too dark and almost crisp! Next time I'll keep them whole as they aren't that big in size. We all loved the flavour of crannberries
I made this meal in September and since hubby isn't that fond of kichdi type of food I haven't come to making it again, but he and sunny boy enjoyed the pumpkin. I don't remember any more how sunny boy liked the millet as such, but he did the dressing for the salad. I have to make it soon to use up my two packets of millets lying in my pantry.