quinoa salad

seeded from: itself

budded from: itself

shoutouts to: blythe

It's our first seed!

A quick explanation of our site before we jump right in. The idea is to have a couple of starting points of inspiration, or seeds, and then see what both our kitchens come up with. We don't really know where this will lead us and maybe both of us will get too busy to actually work on this but I, personally, am SUPER excited.

OK! Let's go! I've been obsessed with this salad since blythe made it for our Yosemite trip and have been sadly trying to replicate that magical experience since then. This was also my first foray into quinoa and am hugely enjoying it!

The beauty of this salad is that it's incredibly flexible. Instead of or in addition to these herbs you could have mint or parsley. Blythe roasted the tomatoes with garlic before putting them in the salad. I want to have this with feta too sometime.

quinoa salad with tomatoes, onion, and herbs

salad ingredients

1 cup quinoa

2 cups water

1/3 cup onions, diced

1 - 2 cloves garlic, minced

1/3 - 1/2 cup cilantro, coarsely chopped

1/4 cup basil

2 cups spinach

1 cup cherry tomatoes

2/3 cup fresh mozarella, sliced or diced or however you prefer

dressing ingredients

balsamic vinegar

olive oil

salt

pepper

making the salad

• First prepare your quinoa anyway you like it. If you want to know how we do it, see here.
• Quarter the cherry tomatoes, small dice the onion, and mince the garlic.
• Saute the diced onion with 1 1/2 Tbsp of olive oil until they are a little bit soft, about 3 minutes. Add the garlic and saute another minute or so until garlic starts to brown.
• When the quinoa is done, stir in the onion-garlic mixture as well as the tomatoes. Chill in the refrigerator. We chilled the quinoa mix for half an hour before we couldn't wait any more so it was still a little warm but also still delicious!
• In the meantime you can prep the rest of your ingredients. We chiffonaded our spinach and our basil by rolling a bunch of the leaves together and slicing thin (I did 1/4") slices. Coarsely chop the cilantro. Do what you want with the mozzarella.
• After the quinoa mix is chilled add in the rest of the ingredients, the dressing, and season with salt and pepper if needed.

making the dressing

• I use a 1:1 ratio of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
• Salt and pepper to your taste, I think for a 1/2 cup of olive oil and balasmic vinegar mixture I added 1/2 tsp each of salt and pepper.
• Shake or mix vigorously