recipe | quinoa and tofu salad (my weekday staple)

I am (unashamedly) a creature of habit. When I find something I like doing, I do it with huge love and commitment and I would do it all day every day, until well, one day when I don’t like doing it any more. And when I like eating something, I eat it as often as I humanly can (sometimes I can eat the same thing every day for weeks – remember my thing with meatballs?) until one day the thought of it makes me gag.

I’d say this is 90% my control-freak-ness and being able to know what I’m going to be doing (eating) two hours / two days / two weeks / two months from now. And 10% because I’m actually a hell of a lot less creative than most people give me credit for, so I kind of stick to what I know.

In any case, most weekdays I eat the same thing for lunch. This quinoa salad, with varied toppings, and by “varied”, I mean 4 out of the 5 ingredients never change and there’s one that I might switch out for something else, once every two weeks.

It’s actually kind of embarrassing. Y’all might know that I have a small addiction to this thing called Instagram, and how I like to share what I eat on there (and occasionally what I wear, which is humongously less interesting). So every day I look at my quinoa salad and I’m like, god don’t I have something – anything! – else to post? Well, the answer is no. And when I do have something different, I get all giddy excited because I can post that and feed the perception that I might actually have variety in my life.

Here are some other versions of the quinoa salad I’ve posted on Instagram recently:

Quinoa with tofu, tomato & cucumber

Quinoa with avocado, sweet corn, green beans, egg & fried shallots

Quinoa with fresh tofu, lettuce, tomato, capsicum, cucumber, avocado & fried shallots

Quinoa with tofu, cucumber, sweet corn & fried shallots

Quinoa with tofu, avocado & sweet corn

Quinoa with tofu, sweet corn, avocado & fried shallots

What? I’m not predictable at all!

Besides, quinoa is actually good for you, so I’m doing myself a favour by eating it every day. Anyway, here’s a recipe for the quinoa and tofu salad right up the top of this page. You don’t have to follow it strictly. Really, you can add anything to quinoa!

… and ps. I’m off to South Africa for work for a couple of weeks… so I’ll see you when I see you. xx