Quinoa, Fruit and Nut Salad For French Fridays

 

Because of black quinoa's striking color, reminds me of wild rice, I decided to use it in my salad this week for French Fridays with Dorie.  Attempting to give my salad even more visual pizazz  I added orange zest and crème fraiche with sprigs of watercress on top.  I did a fair amount of tinkering with this recipe, more than I've done with the past recipes I've made from Around My French Table.  I'm not going to give the original recipe here, if you want it you'll have to pick up Dorie's book.  But, I will pass along all my notes on the changes I made.  Along with the suggested dried cranberries I added strips of dried mangoes and dried figs.  I used pine nuts, pistachios and almonds for the mixed nuts.  I used chopped mint for my herb as that's available in a pot on my deck year round and I like it with all the other flavors.  I added grated fresh ginger and used more walnut oil than olive oil in the vinaigrette.  I substituted crème fraiche for plain yogurt, orange juice for lemon juice and watercress for mixed salad greens.  Hello recipe, I was going for more flavor with the fresh ginger, a higher proportion of walnut oil and crème fraiche instead of plain yogurt, which did not sound appealing to me on top of this salad.  I also prefer orange juice with the zest to using only lemon juice.  The flavors in this salad will continue to develop if allowed to rest for at least an hour at room temperature.  I would take this salad to a picnic and put it together with the greens and crème fraiche right before serving.  My favorite thing about this salad- the figs and the orange zest.  That sounds familiar, I may have made the same comment about the Beggar's Linguine a few weeks ago.

Could this be the start of homemade trail mix or the fruits and nuts for a quinoa salad?

 

Check out what everybody else made here, I'm curious how many Doristas made changes to this recipe??

 Even after all my tinkering or maybe because of it I didn't love this salad, I don't know maybe it needed garlic, or it had too much texture, aka, it got stuck in my teeth.  But on the bright side I sure do have a nice stash of dried fruits and nuts in my pantry.