 Today I'm whipping up a nice quinoa salad with some grilled chicken, tomato, some red onions. I have some spring mix going in there with lots of fresh basil out of my garden and we're going to use some feta cheese and my homemade balsamic vinaigrette. Now if you want to make this vegetarian it's easy to do just take out the chicken and the feta, add a few other ingredients if you wish and you're good to go. So I'm Rockin' Robin and I'm going to show you how to make it right after my chef joke. All right so we're going to start off with chef joke number one which means number two will be a little bit later. All right so here we go. What's the difference between a baby and a salad? Most people don't get angry when you toss a salad. So before we start our recipe I just want to give a quick shout out to a friend of mine Dan Marks. Dan if you're watching this thank you so much for making us a quinoa salad that we got to enjoy on the beach. It was fantastic and it was the inspiration for this video today so thanks a lot. I also want to mention that quinoa is just a powerhouse of nutrition and such a good addition to your diet. It has the highest protein content of any grain and it contains all nine of the essential amino acids which is really unusual in the plant world. It's also high in magnesium and a good source of manganese, iron, copper, phosphorus, vitamin b12 and a great amount of fiber. So it's great for your diet. Okay we're going to start cooking our quinoa because we need to cook that first. It needs to cool before we can add it to a salad otherwise it'll make all of our greens wilt. So I'm using Bob's Red Mill here, tricolor organic. I like to use organic. So I'm just going to make a half a cup of this which will make quite a bit anyway. So what you want to do is measure it out and then we're going to rinse it. So I'll just pour it into my strainer and run it under some water for about 30 seconds. So you want to rinse your grains so that you rinse out the bitterness that's in the outer hole. All right so we'll pour that into a pan. That was a half a cup and then we're going to add a cup of water. So your ratio is typically one to two, one part quinoa and two parts water. And then we're going to place this on the stove and bring it to a boil. So bring your quinoa to a nice rolling boil like you see there. And then I'm going to turn it down but I want it to still simmer. And we're going to let that cook until the water cooks down. Now you could follow the package directions which is different than what I'm showing you. Either way works. I just think that this worked out really nicely for me and it was nice and fluffy and not mushy. So I'm going to let that cook just like that. Water's going to evaporate. It's going to cook down and I'm going to continue probably to lower the temperature just a little bit more. I'm on medium-low right now and I'm going to go probably a little lower but we'll let that go. So we're going to continue to cook our quinoa until it absorbs all of the water. Okay so we're almost there. There's still a little bit more liquid left that I want to cook out and then what we're going to do is we'll turn off the heat. We'll place a lid on this and let it steam for five to six minutes. Now for our chicken I'm using boneless skinless chicken thighs that are organic. This is one of my favorites and you could use chicken breast if you prefer but I just love thighs. And I'm just going to sprinkle and season it up pretty plain pretty simply by just some salt, pepper and garlic powder. Feel free to add others you know other spices if you like it's fine with me. So I have a nice cast iron grill pan here I'll call it a pan but you could cook this on your barbecue any way you want really. It doesn't really matter just you know you just want to cook it up and get it going. So you can use a frying pan if you if you like. Now how do you know when it's hot? Well I like to just splash a little water on there it's pretty darn hot and I'm going to take a little bit of my olive oil and just kind of brush a little bit of oil over the top of this. That way it won't stick too much. Remember I'm just going to place these on here season the side down and then I'm going to season the second side. A little bit of salt again, a little pepper and garlic powder. After about 10 minutes or so we'll flip these over and continue to cook them until they reach an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit. All right it's time to test our internal temperature. I really can't recommend these instant read thermometers enough. Get yourself one you'll love it. All right it must be time for chef joke number two. So here we go play close attention to this one. All right what do you call a chicken looking at a bowl of salad? A chicken sees a salad. Get it? Okay so now we have our chicken and our quinoa already cooked and cooling down because we don't want to mix that with our greens like I said it'll make them wilt. So now oh and by the way if you have a cutting board I'm going to start chopping up a little bit of onion and tomato and if you have a you know cutting board that kind of slides around you know you got a little moving target there take a damp cloth even a paper towel would work and just place it right underneath and it will stick pretty darn good. And you notice I have two cutting boards here right I have a wood one and I use that only for vegetables mostly I never cut the meat on it because it's kind of porous and I don't want bacteria to get in there so that's just for vegetables and then my white one which is not porous is for meat only. Now it's time to cut up a little bit of red onion so very thinly sliced as you can see that I'm doing here and then I'll just give it a little chop make it a little bit smaller and you can just toss that in the bowl now if you like. Next is your tomato you can use cherry tomatoes work just as well this just is what I happen to have so I'm going to cut this into little chunks we'll toss that in the bowl as well this makes a great meal prep kind of dish where you can you know prep it up in the fridge put it put it in ziplock bags and keep everything separate keep your tomatoes separate keep your onions and your quinoa and your chicken all in separate containers and then you can just pull it out and toss it in when you need it next up is my homegrown basil and the leaves are fairly small so you could just toss them in as is if you want I'd like to cut mine a little smaller so that's what I'm going to do the basil I wish you could smell this it smells so good it's so fresh and I'll go ahead and toss that in and then at this point I'm going to add some of my greens here depending on how big I want my salad to be that looks pretty good so I'm just going to give this a toss right now before I add anything else the chicken is cooled off so now it's time to cut it into bite-sized pieces we'll sprinkle that chicken on the salad and then we'll finish it off with our quinoa now we'll dress our salad with our creamy balsamic vinaigrette now give this a real good toss so that's our salad you are going to love this it is so delicious I'm going to serve some up we'll sprinkle on some feta and we're good to go let's do a taste test that basil shines through I love that the chicken everything is just all the flavors together so good in that balsamic vinaigrette you really got to try that I'm going to leave a link for you right over here on the screen right here at the end of the video so you can click on it go over there and make that it's great for any salad and especially this one thank you so much for watching if you haven't subscribed already go ahead and hit that subscribe button smash the like button for me if you enjoyed this video and leave me a comment we'll see you next time for another rockin recipe