Easy Quinoa Salad with Roasted Garlic Dressing
This colourful quinoa salad is loaded with fresh vegetables, roasted spiced beans and a zesty lemon, garlic and tahini dressing. It is delicious warm or cold and can also be wrapped into flatbreads for a quick wrap. If you have cooked quinoa in hand, it will only take you 20 minutes to put this together!
Servings 2
Ingredients
Salad
- 1 cup cooked and cooled quinoa
- ¼ cup chopped bell pepper
- ¼ cup chopped onion optional
- ¼ cup chopped cucumber skins removed
- ¼ cup chopped almonds
- 1 tbsp cranberries or raisins optional
- ½ cup roasted beans recipe below
Dressing
- 3 cloves roasted garlic
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
- 2 tbsp tahini or hummus
- 1 tsp soy sauce
- ½ tsp cumin powder
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
Roasting Garlic and Beans
- Preheat the oven to 180C.
- To a bowl, add 2 tsp olive oil, a pinch of red chilli powder, cumin, salt and add cooked beans. Stir well and transfer to a greased baking tray.
- Chop the corner off a whole clove of garlic, add a little oil on the top and place next to the spiced beans and roast both together for 15 minutes.
- If you don't have an oven or don't want to turn one on, you can saute the spiced beans in a pan until it is mildly crispy. Similarly, pan roast garlic cloves in a drop of oil.
Assembling the salad
- To a large bowl, add the quinoa, chopped vegetables, almonds, raisins and stir well.
- To a smaller bowl, squeeze in 3 cloves of roasted garlic and add the olive oil, lemon juice, tahini or hummus, soy sauce, cumin, pepper and stir well with a whisk or a fork until fully combined.
- For the first variation, simply mix the salad with the dressing and top with chopped mint leaves or parsley. For the second variation, mix the salad with dressing, add the roasted beans and mix well. The amount of dressing in this recipe is for the full batch of one cup quinoa. You can split it among the two variations or add to one.
Notes
- Onions can be skipped if you are not fond of raw onions.
- I used a can of mixed beans, drained and roasted. It can be substituted with chickpeas
- Instead of roasting, the salad will be delicious with cooked beans/chickpeas as it is.