It’s officially summer guys. We have all the fans and aircons in the house serviced and on now and anything even remotely associated with winter is packed and gone into storage. Whine mode is ON and how. Summer makes me cranky and I don’t enjoy anything unless I have cool air blowing in my face. If you’ve followed my blog since last year you’ll know that my hatred for summer goes back a long way and I am not going bore those of you who aren’t new here. So summer sulking stops here. For now.
Speaking of new, the latest update in my life is that the hubs and I have started taking yoga lessons. And to be very honest that is one of the reasons why I haven’t posted last week. We have a trainer coming home reeeeeally early in the morning and basically screwing us everyday. So much so that I couldn’t move a muscle the first week, let alone cook. Haha.
Since we are off to healthy-ish start to summer, I want to mark this beginning by making a salad. To kick off the summer season. Whatever that means 😐 Also, to show off our newly homegrown and might I say – gorgeous – baby spinach. This new character will feature a lot more in our posts this summer 🙂
Spinach Quinoa and Cranberry Salad
Serves 2| Prep time: 2 min | Cook time: 15 min
Ingredients:
Baby spinach – 250 gm
Red onion – 1 large
Dried cranberries – 1/2 cup
Pitted black olives – 2 tbsps
Quinoa – 1 cup
Balsamic Vinegar – 1 1/2 tbsp
Extra Virgin Olive oil – 1 tsp
Salt & Pepper – to season
Directions:
Being a salad with literally 5 ingredients, all you have to do is make sure your spinach is cleaned well, have your quinoa cooked and fluffed and toss all of the ingredients together.
Start with cooking the quinoa. Generally cooking the quinoa by the instructions on the packet is the best way to go because quinoa produced in different regions brings slight variations in the cooking time, quite like rice. What I normally do is soak the quinoa in warm water for about 5 minutes and then boil it for about 8 minutes. Of course this depends on the quantity of quinoa you are cooking. Quinoa has a little bite to it, ensure you don’t overcook it. Once cooked, leave it to cool down.
Mix the balsamic vinegar and olive oil together, beat it a little bit and pour over the ingredients. Make sure you do not mix hot cooked quinoa with your spinach. heat makes spinach wilt a bit and we don’t want that to happen to our salad.
Toss together and munch away. This is best served at room temperature.
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