A few months back I tried my hands at making aquafaba mousse and it turned pretty close to being good. Actually, taste wise it was excellent but the texture needed some improvement. However, the brilliant me forgot to jot down the ratio of ingredients that I had used…blunder! I tried replicating the mousse again, trying to guess work on the amount/ratio of ingredients I had used and it turned out to be a disaster and after a couple of more tries I finally gave up coz we were having problem of abundance. I didn’t use store brough canned chickpeas and made my own and there was a glut of chickpeas that needed to be used. I tried to incorporate it in a variety of dishes such as this salads, curry, pancakes, hummus and even shared some with my domestic help! So, by the end of the aquafaba trials, we were seriously tired of eating chickpeas. For the time being, I have put the aquafaba experiments and the mousse thoughts aside for a while
The salad however was my favorite coz the effort was minimum and it provided me a balanced sort of meal. I didn’t really keep any fancy dressing and it was rather a dash lemon and some salt and red chili flakes only. I used black rock salt instead of regular salt. I am providing an estimated amount of ingredients which you can adjust to taste and increase or decrease their amount in your bowl of salad.
½ C uncooked Quinoa
2 – 2½C cooked Chickpeas
½ C diced (in small pieces) Zuchhini
¼ C diced (small) Tomatoes
¼ – ½ C chopped greens of Spring Onion
2 tsp Capers
2 tbsp dried Blue Berries or Raisins (even cranberries will work well)
2 tbsp slivered Almonds
2 tbsp roughly chopped fresh Coriander (Cilantro)
Salt and red chili flakes to taste
1 – 2 tsp Lemon juice
Rinse the quinoa in water a couple of times and drain the water. Add the quinoa in one cup of water in a pot on high heat. Allow the water to come to a boil and reduce heat. Cover and cook the quinoa for 15 minutes or according to the instructions given on the pack. Switch off the heat and remove the pot from heat and allow the quinoa to cool down. Fluff with fork and use it for the salad.
Mix everything and toss well together. Taste and adjust the seasoning.
Serves – 4