Recipe #30: a versatile quinoa salad

 Today I will show you how to make a versatile quinoa salad.

Ingredients:

The list of ingredients is irrelevant because you can add almost anything to this salad and it will be fine. There’s quinoa, of course, but the remaining ingredients can be whatever you have on hand. Someone gifted me the package of Veggie Sticks Salad Topper, so in they go. We had cucumbers in the garden, so giddy up. I forgot to put feta cheese in this photo, but it makes an appearance because I thought of it later. And so on.

Ignore the defrosting tofu burger sitting on top of the toaster oven. That’s not in the salad but will be eaten on the side. But who’s to say it couldn’t go in the salad too? Who’s to say??

Directions:

First, we make the quinoa, and we make it pasta-style by boiling a big pot of water. We also start, simultaneously, by boiling a little pot of water for the frozen shelled edamame:

Simultaneously, we roast up some frozen corn kernels in the toaster oven on fairly high heat for as long as it takes to get them toasty brown but not burned:

Add one cup of quinoa to the big pot of boiling water, and a nice amount of shelled edamame to the little pot of boiling water. Cook the quinoa at a simmer for 15 minutes and the edamame for about 5 minutes:

After 15 minutes of simmering, drain the quinoa and return it to the pot, lid on, off the heat, to steam for a few minutes:

Remove the lid and let the quinoa cool down.

Drain the edamame and let them cool off too.

Then start adding everything to a big bowl:

In the photo above we have the quinoa, edamame, and roasted corn. 

Add your chopped cucumber, chopped red pepper, chopped red onion, and look at that—there’s the crumbled feta cheese!

Add a glug or two of red wine vinegar and a few glugs of olive oil:

Mix it all together, top it with the Veggie Sticks, and voilà! Versatile quinoa salad!

Other interesting ingredients could have been toasted nuts or seeds, dried cranberries or raisins or other dried fruit, crumbled canned fish, chickpeas or a chopped boiled egg. Or whatever!

Here we are, the following day with the leftovers, to which I have added some leftover Mexican slaw, a chopped ripe avocado, and a chopped picked egg:

I can’t even tell you how good this is!

Quinoa salad: always good, and so versatile!

Addendum November 24/24: today’s variation was quinoa (natch), edamame, roasted frozen corn kernels, feta cheese, a cubed Spartan apple, and toasted pecans tossed in maple syrup, with a dressing of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and maple syrup drippings from the pecans. Out! Of! This! World!