Confession: I love food.

Along with my love of good food, I also love finding new recipes and trying them.  I love it especially when I find a new one that I love!!!  This is the case with last night's quinoa salad.

A couple weeks ago, I was perusing a leftover copy of Real Simple magazine.  I like that magazine because it offers fabulous tips & useful tricks.  The magazine usually showcases a new food and then gives you different options.  In this particular issue, they were suggesting trying couscous.  (Note:  Couscous is gluteneous.  I actually did not know that couscous was a major no-no for the gluten intolerant.  It's listed on my 5-page list of NO-NO's.) 

The picture of the salad looked fabulous...  There were chunks of avocado and onions...and a smattering of kidney beans.  And too top it off - fresh squeezed lime juice.  My taste buds were salivating.

I pondered the recipe and the texture of couscous and wondered if I could substitute to quinoa, so I did the most logical thing...I sent a text to my mom.  She didn't see why it would be issue and bid me goodluck!!!

Sunday night I cooked the quinoa.  It takes about 20 minutes for the all the water to absorb and the quinoa to expand.  Cooking this the night before really did help my Monday night to be too insanely crazy from the time I returned from work and the rush-rush-rush to get back out the door to Ladies Club.

Here's a picture of tonight's (Tuesday) supper - leftover quinoa, kidney bean, and lime salad.

And here's my version of the recipe...

Ingredients:
3 cups of quinoa cooked
2 15-ounce cans of kidney beans, drained and rinsed.
2 avocados, cut into chunks
8 scallions, chopped
2 limes, juiced

Directions:
1. Cook quinoa per directions.
2. Chill cooked quinoa.
3. In a bowl, combine all ingredients and stir well.
4. Stir in quinoa.
5. Serve salad chilled.  Enjoy!