Nina makes a healthy quinoa salad by cooking one cup of quinoa in a rice cooker, then mixing it with overnight-soaked kidney beans, cherry tomatoes, arugula, and cilantro. She seasons it with olive oil, salt, pepper, and lemon juice, sharing tips like rinsing beans in cold water to make them easier to mix.
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Hi, my name is Nina. Today we're gonna make quinoa salad. First, I need to get 1 cup of quinoa. This is the quinoa that I bought from Costco. They always have instructions on the back. Add 2 cups water to 1 cup quinoa. It says bring to boil, but I'm gonna use the rice cooker. First, I need to wash the quinoa. 1 cup of quinoa. I need to rinse the quinoa first in 2 cups of water. 2. I'm gonna pour into this rice cooker. Okay, so I'm gonna let it cook. They don't have a setting for quinoa, so you can either use brown rice brown rice or white rice. Last time I used brown rice, but it took so long to cook, about like 50 minutes. Right now I'm gonna try the white rice, see how long it will cook. I forgot to mention what ingredient that I use for quinoa salad. I use kidney beans. You can use black beans, but I bought kidney beans. You have to let it soak overnight. I didn't use the whole bag, I use like quarter, one-third of the bag. This was soaked from last night. And I also use cherry tomatoes. I like— I found this one from Costco. It has like few different colors. So, and then I also use arugula. It's mixed with spinach too. And cilantro. I like to add red pepper and of course salt, um, ground pepper, and then olive oil. That's it. So right now I'm gonna make the beans and pour into here and let it cook for half an hour. So while waiting for the beans and quinoa to cook, I'm gonna prepare to cut the cherry tomato and the cilantro. Okay, so I'm gonna cut some stems off. I don't like the stems, only need the leaves. The preparation is boring, just chopping up the cilantro into small pieces. So you take a cherry tomato and place the knife on the top and use your index and thumb to hold the tomato in the middle of the knife and cut it in half. So it's boiling, the pot is boiling at I'm going to stir the pot. It has to cook for half an hour. I like more tomatoes in my quinoa salad, so I'm putting more. I can smell the quinoa right now. I'm not sure if you can smell it. So I'm done all the cutting. So we have about another 20 minutes for the beans. Maybe we should pause, wait for the beans. I have nothing to do right now. I don't remember why, but I always put the salt in in the water to boil. First, it will boil faster. Second, it adds flavor into whatever you're cooking. Cheers! So the beans are done and the quinoa is cooked. It took probably half an hour to cook. I'm gonna unplug it, let it cool, open it. You can see all the steam is coming out and the beans are done. I'm gonna turn off the stove and I think I'm gonna put in to a bowl and rinse it off. Rinse the beans. I want to rinse the beans so it's cold and it's easy to mix. Scoop it off first. You can cool off the beans by leaving in the fridge overnight or you can just rinse it off with cold water. But if you're going to leave it in the fridge, make sure you have to rinse the beans every day or else it's going to get very smelly. Okay, this is done. I'm going to put the beans in the bowl. The bowl has the cherry tomatoes that are already chopped up. Okay, I'm going to transfer the quinoa over. It's a little hot. It's okay. It's actually cooked very well with the rice cooker. So to open this salad, this spinach and arugula, you could— if you read the label, it says open here, open here. Not open like this from the corner like someone else.
That's what this guy does and makes a huge mistake.
Okay, maybe 3, 2, 2 handfuls, or actually 3 handfuls. Okay, and then mix it together so olive oil about 3 tablespoons, but I just do it like this. That's all. And then for salt, to taste, depends how salty you like it. Evan likes pretty salty food, so mix it. Hot pepper, same thing, depends how spicy you like you want your salad to be. Evan doesn't really like spicy food, so I'm not gonna put that much. And then I'm gonna add the cilantro, the cilantro that I cut up earlier. Okay, and then mix it well. Oh, one more thing you have to add to the salad is the— you can use the fresh lemon, or, but we don't have fresh lemon, so we're gonna use the the lemon juice instead, about 1 teaspoon maybe. Actually, you don't have to, but if you want, you could. I'm just going to add a little bit, maybe like 2 pinch. Okay. You want to see? It looks very pretty. You want to see? It's done. Do you need more salt? No, it's good. Yeah?
The tomatoes are awesome.
We like to be healthy. Quinoa is healthy. We use quinoa instead of rice.
White rice is not that healthy for you. It's white. White foods, white anything is not healthy for you. White bread, white cereals. I don't know what else there is. Why am I on this show? I'm just— Talk. I'm just eating. That's my role.
Thank you for watching. Please. Believe. Bye. Is it on? Yeah. Oh, you didn't tell me. What's so funny? I'm gonna add a little bit more olive oil. Oh, no more.
You gonna have some?
No.
What do you mean no?
Oh, I'm full.
Have a little bit.
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