Tahini Quinoa Salad

Hello! It’s Melissa.

Tonight, I’m posting one of my most favorite quinoa salads (I feel like I saw that a lot…).  It’s Matt’s favorite (and a frequent request) and I’ve brought it to a few events and always get recipe requests.  It is adapted from the Whole Life Nutrition Cookbook.  (It’s a fantastic cookbook – gluten-free, dairy-free and filled with over 200 recipes.  I’ve made a number of recipes from it and always end up loving them.)

But back to the quinoa salad.

Ingredients:

2 mini cucumbers (cut in half lengthwise, scoop out the seeds with a spoon and then chopped up)

30 baby carrots (cut into discs…obviously the number doesn’t matter, but I thought I’d give an idea of how many I use)

1 pack of cherry tomatoes (chopped in half, salted)

2 cans of garbanzo beans (cooked in a pan with salt and garlic powder until a little crispy)

1/4 cup toasted pine nuts

1/4 red onion (finely diced – if you don’t know how to chop an onion properly (like me until recently, I suggest you check out this video from gluten-free girl)

1.5 cups of quinoa (1.5 cups dry…then cook)

Dressing:

1/2 cup of sesame tahini

1/2 cup fresh lemon juice (This is about 2 lemons, I always like a little more…)

1/4 cup olive oil

3 Tbls water

2 cloves of garlic (crushed…diced…grated – in small bits)

zest of 2 lemons

Salt to taste

Directions:

Chop all the veggies and put them in a bowl:

*This is the first time I used cucumbers in the salad – I didn’t de-seed them and it got kind of watery..I’m hoping de-seeding them would help with this problem…

Make the quinoa, cook the garbanzo beans and toast the pinenuts

Mix the dressing ingredients together – I use an electronic hand mixer, although you can use a whisk it – but that can be tough because the tahini is very thick, so it’s kind of challenging to mix with just a whisk.

Pour the dressing over the quinoa, pinenuts, garbanzos, and veggies and ENJOY!

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