It was the middle of the summer, which meant that I was in the mood for something “cool,” and salads tend to fit that bill. So I made the Quinoa Salad with Black Beans & Toasted Cumin Seeds (page 31), which struck me as a twist on some standard ingredients in Mexican food. The result? It was fine, but not something I think I would make again. To be fair, the beans didn’t cook very well and were still kind of hard and lacking in flavor, so I think canned beans would work better the next time around. In general, I like the idea of making beans myself, but the truth is that they take a lot of planning and time and only turn out good some of the time (at least in my experience). Other substitutions I made were using different tomatoes than the recipe called for, and vegetable oil instead of grapeseed oil, but those hardly affected the taste. Were I to make this again, I suppose I would have more ingredients or just less quinoa overall, since that dominated the dish in a way that made it kind of boring.
Made: July 9, 2013
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