Summer Salad Series: Our simple Quinoa Salad Recipe
We are so excited to introduce our Summer Salad Series! Over the holidays, we’ll be sharing the recipes for our favourite summer salads - they are delicious, healthy and super easy to knock up for your friends and family in no time at all. And if you're looking for menu inspiration for your Christmas Day lunch, you’re in the right place!
The first recipe in our Summer Salad Series is our Quinoa Salad with shredded chicken, goats cheese, greens, avocado and garden herbs. This is our “go to” salad during the week and one we always serve when we have friends and family over for meals. It’s a big hit! And whilst we are celebrating Christmas Day with my family at Sails Restaurant in Noosa this year, we have a few long lunches planned in our garden, and this will be one of the salads we'll be serving up. It gets a lot of "mmmm yummm" at the table. And nothing brings us more joy than that! Now before we continue, we wanted to let you know this is the quick and easy version of this salad. No one wants to spend hours in the kitchen prepping, so we've included a few ingredient hacks! Read on for the recipe. We hope you love this summer salad as much as we do!
Ingredients
1 Cup of quinoa
2 Cups of shredded chicken breast (buy a roast chook for this or roast, pan fry or sous vide your own chicken breast)
1 Avocado sliced
1 Green capsicum sliced
1 Cucumber sliced
1 Cup of fresh spinach leaves chopped
A handful of long green beans and/or a handful of sugar snap peas
A handful of garden herbs, such as flat leaf parsley or chives
1/4 Cup of fresh spring onion sliced
Meredeth Dairy Marinated Goats Cheese, 2 cubes per person
1 Lemon
Salt (we love Maldon Sea Salt)
Cracked pepper
Method
Wash the quinoa if you want to, then place 1 cup of quinoa with 2 cups of water into a microwave safe dish and put in the microwave for 15 minutes until fluffy and soft. All of the water should have been soaked up by the quinoa. You can also cook the quinoa using the same method in a pot by bringing the water to boil then turning the heat down low and let it simmer until the quinoa is fluffy.
Whilst you're doing this prep the chicken, avocado, capsicum, cucumber, spinach leaves, beans and/or sugar snap peas, and garden herbs. Place all of these ingredients into a big salad bowl.
Combine the cooked quinoa into the big salad bowl and stir. Add the juice of a lemon (as much or as little as you desire), then season with sea salt and cracked pepper.
To serve, crumble a few cubes of Meredith Dairy Marinated Goats Cheese on top of the salad (it's the best on the market in our humble opinion) and pour some of the infused oil from the jar onto the salad. Garnish with your freshly sliced spring onion.
And enjoy!
