Quinoa and Black bean salad

I got introduced to salads after coming to US. Can you have salad as a meal?? If you would have asked me this question 7 years ago, I would have replied, what? No way… But now, I love them. Salads doesn’t mean just lettuce and greens. Thanks to my friend Tami for introducing me to a variety of salads. Her salads are so yum :-)

She made this salad for one of our team potluck. Just loved it and it became a staple in our household. I make it in bulk, and have it for lunch for the whole week. Protein filled salad. Basically we got this recipe from epicurious.com. I just followed the recipe pretty much same from epicurious, just adjusting the proportion. And the only one variation is, I didn’t go for jalapeño chillies. I just used the regular Indian chilly and also added shallots.

Here is what I did,

Ingredients:

Quinoa – 1 cup
Black Beans – 1 can (you can soak kidney beans overnight and pressure cook them too)
Green Bell Pepper – 1
Green Chillies – 2
Water to cook quinoa
Corn – 1/4 cup (I used frozen corn)
Finely Chopped Cilantro – 1/4 cup
Finely chopped Shallots – 2

Dressing:

Red Wine Vinegar – 1 tbsp
Olive oil – 3 tbsps
Cumin Powder – 1 tsp
Ground Black Pepper – 2 tsps (as required)
Lemon Juice – 2 tbsps
Salt – 1.5 tsps

Steps:

Finely chop the bell peppers, shallots and cilantro.
If you are using canned beans, rinse them well.
Deseed and finely chop the green chillies.

Cook the quinoa.
- Wash the quinoa nicely.
- Boil the water. Add a tsp of oil and 1/4 tsp of salt.
- Once the water to starts to boil add the quinoa and when it is half done cover and cook for 5 more minutes.
- Once the quinoa is cooked, drain the water and fluff it well.
- You can also pressure cook the quinoa.