Carlo and I just got back from a three-day camping trip in Zion National Park. We had an incredible time, and it just might be my new favourite place in the world. When we go camping, we like to make up some hearty salad-type recipes that we can eat for lunch, so you don’t get stuck eating sandwiches on stale bread with dodgy lunch meat every day.

When we went camping in Death Valley last month, we made the Marinated Chickpeas and Pasta with Roasted Tomatoes and Black Olives. We make these dishes before we leave and stick them in plastic containers in the cooler, so we can take them out for a quick lunch or picnic. This tactic works really well and you always have something filling and tasty on hand, so you can spend more time having fun on your trip instead of slaving over the camp stove or grill.

One of my old friends Britney had forwarded me this Quinoa Salad recipe from the incredible blog 101 Cookbooks after reading about the Quinoa Sopa Seco. I’ve had this recipe on my list of things to cook for a while, and thought our trip to Zion would be the perfect place to test it out.

This Quinoa Salad recipe made 5 very large lunch-sized servings at $1.21 per serving.

I put just a tiny bit of olive oil in a hot pan to brown the tofu. Even though the recipe already calls for extra firm tofu, the browning helps make it even firmer and you can also season the tofu at this point to make it a bit tastier too.

Since I’m a fairly recent convert to quinoa and others may be too, here is an up close photo of what cooked quinoa looks like. Be sure to keep on cooking it so you can see all of the grains’ curliques. I like cooking my quinoa in some vegetable or chicken broth for some added flavour.

I didn’t really follow a recipe for pesto, but just chucked in some fresh picked basil from my potted garden, some toasted pine nuts, grated Parmesan cheese, and salt and pepper in the mini food processor. I whizzed all of that up and then added enough olive oil to make the mixture into a paste–so much better than the jarred stuff you can get at the grocery store.

The finished result tasted delicious and was my first “full” recipe made from my new garden. In case you are a bit nervous about making pesto, here is a classic pesto recipe to follow.

This Quinoa Salad was pretty easy to make and like Carlo’s Fritatta, this recipe has endless possibilities about what kind of veggies or protein you can use. It would be a great thing to make on a Sunday afternoon so you can use up whatever leftover vegetables are still in the fridge and get a head start on the week by having a few days’ worth of lunches prepared. I didn’t have any cherry tomatoes in the house, so I used some of this awesome roasted tomato paste that we bought in Argentina, which was a nice salty touch.

This recipe turned out to be the perfect camping trip lunch. It tasted great and really filled us up so we could hike to our hearts’ content. Even though Carlo did make a quip that he felt like a total hippie eating quinoa and tofu while camping

The incredible view from our campsite.

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