A couple of days ago my wife made this yummy and easy Quinoa and Tuna salad. We tend to eat these kinds of salads often because it is a real change from a green salad, and these are really easy to eat cold.
Usually if you have some kind of salad with a hot grain in it like rice it is terrible to eat when it is cold.
This Quinoa Salad is really a mixture of a lot of things that you usually have in the kitchen already plus cooked quinoa.
Here are the ingredients as well as how my wife made this.
Ingredients for Quinoa and Tuna Salad
- 2 cups of dried Quinoa Cooked (Yields about 5 cooked cups)
- finely chopped cucumber, carrots, peas, tomatoes, and peppers
- Mixture of pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, slivered almonds, and dried cranberries
- 1 can of tuna
- 1 sliced up avocado
- 1 can of chick peas (why are these called peas? They really are a bean)
- Also we had a can of other mixed beans that did not have kidney beans. They were mainly romano beans.
The recipe is really just having a core salad type mix as you see in our yellow bowl and then all the other things are on the side as toppings. Some of them each of our kids like more or less than others.
Assembling a Great Mixed Salad of Quinoa and Veggies
- So to put this together my wife cooked the quinoa and then let it cool for a half hour or so. This brought it to room temperature.
- At the same time she cut up the carrots into little pieces and also roughly chopped the pea pods. She diced up both the peppers and tomatoes and added some of the romano beans and stirred up the mix.
- Tuna was broken up into a bowl as a meat style protein to put on top of this mix and then mix into our bowl of food.
- Pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, slivered almonds, and dried cranberries were all just mixed in a bowl to top onto our salad
- The kids are weird about Avocado, they will either like it or hate it depending on the day so we had this chopped to the side.
- And finally we had more beans in a side container as my wife and I wanted more of these.
How Did This New Salad Go Over In Our House?
First of all on the left here you can see what the nutrition breakdown is if you make 6 servings out of this recipe.
I think that this salad is a real hit in our house.The kids are still interested in the idea that they get to make their meal, choose what they want and skip what they want so that they can have a bowl of whatever they really like with lots and lots of choice.
As for my lunch the next day, I was able to put all of the stuff that I wanted together and then had one small container with some Tuna, and a small baggy with my seed mixture
This is a really fantastic meal as it has lots of everything that you need and seeing how it has so many great fresh vegetables it is high in vitamins and minerals. To top it off the seeds, beans, and tuna raise the amount of protein to make this a protein rich meal as well.
Here is the meal breakdown when I dropped it into MyFitnessPal as a 6 serving meal (your numbers may vary)
- 0.67 of a cup, Dried Cranberries
- 3 Tb, Pumpkin Seeds
- 1 medium, Carrots, raw
- 1 cup, Chick Peas
- 1 can drained (2.7 oz), Tuna
- 2 oz, Fresh Snow Peas
- 1 Cup, Romano Beans
- 60 g in shell (3/4 cup), Sun Flower Seeds – Original
- 300 g, Cucumbers
- 1 medium, Avocado
- 2 cup, Quinoa
- 3 oz(s), Tomatos
- 9.00 g, Slivered
- 1 medium (approx 2-3/4″ long, 2-1/2″ dia), Peppers, sweet, red, raw
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