Meatless Monday: Quinoa and Summer Veggie Salad

I needed a quick Meatless Monday meal since the boys were finishing up the pizza from my son’s birthday party.  Wow, I can’t believe he will be 8 years old this week.  Yikes.

Anyway, I had too much pizza this weekend so I needed something healthy so I made a cold Quinoa and Veggie Salad.  As usual, you can add any veggies you like and I used what I had from my garden and from my farm share.  You can even play with the seasonings.  I’m thinking this one could have been nice if I added some chili powder and went southwest but I just used a homemade Italian salad dressing that I had on hand.  Remember, I needed something quick.  Yesterday I actually cooked the quinoa and I had grilled up the corn on Saturday night and had a few cobs left over so all I had to do was pull a few more things together and I was done.

Ingredients

2 cups cooked quinoa

2 roma tomatoes, diced

1 cucumber, diced

¼ red onion, diced

2 cobs roasted corn kernels

1 19 oz can black beans

Salad dressing

I find the key to a good quinoa salad is to spread the hot cooked quinoa out on a cookie sheet to dry.  Otherwise it clumps together.  You can skip this step but I find the texture and appearance is better when working with dry, “fluffy” quinoa.  You can also use frozen corn if you don’t have any fresh, sweet summer corn. 

 

 

 

Simply mix all the ingredients together and add your choice of salad dressing.  I made a simple Italian dressing using Penzey’s Spices Italian Dressing base.  I love Penzey’s.  I started with about ¼ cup but I had to add a little more, almost another ¼ cup.  You’ll have to add more the next day if you don’t eat all of it the first day. 

 

This is a great light dinner or lunch and it would make a great side to chicken or a steak (I eat grass fed beef and bison – both extra lean). 

This is also a family friendly meal.  Both my son’s eat it.  While making it my 3 year old insisted on being my sous chef and having a taste or two, or three!