Have you ever eaten a quinoa salad? If you are like most people you may or may not have ever even tried quinoa yet alone tried quinoa in a salad. However quinoa salads are really delicious and simple to prepare. You can get lots of ideas on how to cook quinoa from How to Cook Quinoa or my other blog post on The 500 Best Quinoa Recipes as well. Here are the basics of how to make a quinoa salad:
1. Cook some quinoa if you haven’t already. I recommend the white quinoa for making salads although the red quinoa can work really well also.
2. Let the quinoa cool down. While you can make a quinoa salad with hot quinoa, I personally prefer the taste of a cold quinoa salad. If you have the time, it is best to put the quinoa in a container and cool it down in the refrigerator over night. Otherwise if you are in a hurry you can put a cold ice pack underneath the container or you can add 1-2 ice cubes and let them melt to cool down the quinoa.
3. Decide what kind of ingredients you want to use. Do you want to make a vegan quinoa salad, or do you want to add meat? Personally I like both kinds however, I’ve found that chicken, and tuna are the best meats to use if you decide to use meat.
Some of my favorite ingredients to add include: tomatoes, celery, carrots, canned black olives, red onions, avocado and red or green peppers. If you can have cheese, then adding a little bit of pharmesan cheese or feta cheese works really well also. Other kinds of cheese do not work as well. You can also add in some cooked broccoli or spinach although I personally prefer to stick with raw ingredients for most cold quinoa salads and to include cooked vegetables with meats with warm or hot quinoa and butter or olive oil.
4. You can also use quinoa to make a salad bar or pile ups for a dinner just like you would do with rice. You put the quinoa in a large bowl and the other ingredients in smaller bowls.
Have you ever made a quinoa salad? If so did you like it? What ingredients did you use? I’d love it if you’d share with me in the comments below.
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