Cold Quinoa Salad

Posted by amanda in budget, celery, cucumber, dressing, easy, healthy, quinoa, recipe, salad, tomato, vegetable, vegetarian, yellow pepper

1 comments

The finished product~

After all that holiday cheer (turkey pies, bacon based salads, and wines of all kinds), it might be time to get back to basics...like vegetables, and primary colors. This cold quinoa salad has both of those things, and is really easy to make. Though he might just be trying to placate me, M said he liked this one too. I adapted this recipe from a recipe on a box of Casbah quinoa...it didn't look like it would have enough crunch or flavor as it was originally intended, so I adjusted some quantities and ingredients to make up for that:

Fluff your quinoa to give it texture and to
make it grainy

First, cook up your quinoa (225g, or 1.5 cups):
To do this, bring 3 cups of vegetable broth to a boil.
Then add your quinoa to the broth; stir, and reduce the heat to low. Allow this to cook for between 15-20 minutes: you want the water to be completely absorbed by the quinoa.
When cooked, fluff the quinoa with a fork.
Let the quinoa cool while you prepare the rest of the salad ingredients.






In a large bowl combine:

Half a cucumber (I prefer skin intact) - thickly sliced and quartered
3-4 stalks of celery  - sliced
1 quart grape tomatoes - halved
1 yellow pepper - roughly chopped
(half a red onion would probably delicious chopped into this, though I didn't do so myself)
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley (you could up this even, especially if you love parsley, and go to 1/2 cup)









In a small bowl, whisk together:

Apple Cider Dressing

1/4 cup virgin olive oil
4 tbsp Apple Cider Vinegar
1.5 clove garlic, minced
2 tsp red pepper flakes
3 or 4 good cracks of black pepper



Once the quinoa has cooled, combine it with the vegetables. Drizzle the dressing over the mixture and let sit in the fridge for a few hours to let the flavours settle.

A nice touch would be to add 2 handfuls of fresh baby spinach to the mix before serving.