Chop, simmer, and story your way to an incredibly healthy, surprisingly delicious, quinoa and mung bean salad. Plus, no sense doing all this recipe prep for a one night stand supper. The first 5 ingredients make extra salad base, which can be kept in the fridge for up to 5 days and repurposed by adding broth to make an amazing vegetable soup.
The Ingredients…
Salad base:
2 medium organic… (basically just
insert ‘organic’ in front of everything
on this list) sweet potatoes
3 medium beets
1 cup quinoa (uncooked)
1 cup dry mung beans
2 cups frozen peas
Salad garnish:
1 free range egg
1 green onion
1/4 cup chopped flat leaf parsley
1/4 cup raw pumpkin seeds
Himalayan rock salt
Smokin’ hemp heart dressing:
2 tbsp raw apple cider vinegar
3-4 tbsp light olive oil
1 tbsp whole grain mustard
2 tbsp hemp hearts
1 tbsp buckwheat honey
Himalayan rock salt
The Directions…
Don’t bother soaking the mung beans, just rinse and get them simmering in a pot until tender (approx. 45-60 min.). Scrub and cube sweet potatoes and beets. Roast in 400 degree oven on lightly oiled baking tray until tender – 20-30 min (beets take a few minutes longer). Prepare quinoa – don’t forget to rinse! Defrost peas in warm water. Cool all base components, then combine equal quantities of each and coat with (shaken) smokin’ hemp heart dressing. Garnish with chopped onion, parsley, pumpkin seeds and a 3 minute soft poached egg.
The Story…
Claire manages to hold herself together all the way through Calgary’s Community Natural Foods, each aisle more intimidating than the last. Bee pollen? She reads the package again to make sure. Seriously? WTF? Like swallowing the taste of a BJ while walking up the aisle to take communion, Claire’s breath and body are still ripe from last night’s fatty fish and chips debauchery. Even though the Natural Foods staff is cheerfully inclusive – not to mention frighteningly encyclopedic where gluten in concerned – Claire can’t help feeling like this whole health food thing is a cliquey club and she doesn’t know the secret handshake. Sure, the vegetables are brighter, the bran somehow brannier, and the dense loaves perverse concentrations of nutrition… But the overt, narrow eyed, judgement from the checkout line tells her she’s screwed up the official password when she makes the rookie mistake of keeping, rather than donating, her $0.05 bag credit.
Claire keeps her composure even as her stomach rumbles in despair at the rainbow spread on her kitchen counter. Rich oranges, greens, and purples, but still so darn far from being edible. How do people do this everyday? Don’t these people have lives?! Claire can’t quite put herself in a category with anyone who would ever, under any circumstance, choose carob over chocolate, or worse, use hemp for its health, rather than hallucinogenic properties – such a waste. Change is bullshit! The veggies don’t argue back. Why would they? Change is bullshit. It’s hard and long and hurts until you warm up to… er… it. But we only do what we want to do and somewhere deep inside Claire’s brain, her most primitive self is craving a new form of satisfaction – system state satisfaction.
Why does healthy have to take so much freakin’ work!! Already her boss, her kids, her hair, take so much of her before she gets anything back. Why can’t somebody just make me a sandwich! Claire finally loses her cool when the mung beans explode in protest after being ignored for three seconds too long. Lid in hand, faced with the tragic pot of grey-green Oliver Twist – “please sir no more!” – mush, she stands there hating the bastard beans, and hating this whole ungodly, unmanageable process. She sniffles, then sobs, then wails with the kind of abandon only a woman alone in a kitchen where everything’s gone wrong can truly experience. Why does life have to TAKE so much!!
But one bite of this magnificent quinoa and mung bean salad turns the entire thing around. The truth flows free with the soft, delicate release of the yellow yolk. This is life. Offer it a little time and attention, a little love, and it gives back more than we’ve ever dared to ask.
Enjoyed this storied recipe? Why not try a taste of Blank Canvas Living’s I want sex tonight steak sandwich…
Blank Canvas Living 
Quinoa’s an amazing food and what intrigues me, as much as anything else, is the name – one of those borrow words in English that has a total disconnect between spelling and saying. Somehow, that seems to make it all the more exotic.
As if those tiny-tailed-translucent-alien-egg-sacs weren’t exotic enough on their own! 😉 Quinoa contains a healthy balance of all 9 essential amino acids (including the ever elusive lysine). It’s also completely delicious, despite being closely related to the decidedly unexotic tumbleweed, pitseed goosefoot, and the even more off-putting plant kin ‘fat hen’.
Hmmm, I’ve been quite spoiled as a “Cymbria” – with all the name’s implied (not that I’m refuting) exoticism. If I were to cast it off, would I be as sweet? Hard to say… I’ve always been more salty – in life and in language – anyhow lolz!
Who knew
Bean there mung that, couldn’t keep it up
Good luck!
Not quinoa on quinoa? Bean beet up and had your hemp heart broken? Done with mung? A spoonful of buckwheat punny helps the medicine go down… “in the most delightful way…”
Reblogged this on Healing Myself.
Thank you so much Patricia! What a compliment 🙂
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” – Hippocrates
It sure helps that a salad, even one as obscenely healthy as this one, is a heck of a lot tastier than any hit of Buckleys lol. Best of luck on your own journey to healthful living – you’re looking great!