Healthy Quinoa Taco Salad

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You’ll love this recipe for healthy quinoa taco salad topped with our homemade taco sauce. It’s a great family meal and perfect for a game night when you still want to maintain your healthy eating.

Healthy Quinoa Taco Salad, a New Spin on Taco Night

This healthy quinoa taco salad represents the newest spin on taco night in our house. My wife and I have always loved tacos and discovered they were a relatively good family friendly meal because of ease of prep, variety, and because we’ve had pretty good success with our kids eating them in some form (not true of all foods). Sometimes it’s about giving your kids enough choices until they find one they are comfortable with and with tacos there are always lots of choices.

From traditional hard and soft-wrapped tacos, to fish tacos, to shrimp tacos, to these cod fish tacos with fish taco sauce , to taco dip; we’ve tried a lot of taco-themed items with our kids and had pretty good success. I think they like having choices and being able to select their favorite ingredients. As parents, we like being able to keep things pretty healthy and being able to introduce new ingredient choices and new food presentations; both of which come into play with this healthy quinoa salad as we are trying to introduce our kids to quinoa and get them more into eating salads.

After making our cilantro quinoa bowl back in the fall, we had some of all the ingredients left over. We ended up just throwing them into a bowl with a ton of lettuce and realized it made the perfect taco salad. We ended up dressing the salad with our homemade taco sauce. It tastes great, our kids love it, and it really adds to the taco salad experience. We’ve used store bought bottled taco sauce before, but sometimes you read the back of those bottles and feel guilty about the many ingredients you can’t even pronounce. So when we realized how easy it was to make, making our own homemade taco sauce became a no-brainer.

Making the Switch to Homemade Taco Sauce

We’ve used store bought bottled taco sauce before, but sometimes you read the back of those bottles and feel guilty about the many ingredients you can’t even pronounce. So when we realized how easy it was to make our own homemade taco sauce, it was a no-brainer. The kids who can sometimes be high-level food change detectives didn’t even notice when we made the switch from store-bought to homemade. Shhh! 🙂

We’ve always loved quinoa and use it as a rice substitute in a lot of recipes, from the above-mentioned cilantro quinoa bowls to this asparagus quinoa risotto to this yummy quinoa fajita casserole. Quinoa is an ancient grain with lots of health benefits and we love the taste so it has quickly become a regular part of our diet.

This healthy quinoa taco salad recipe is about as easy as it gets because aside from cooking the quinoa it’s pretty much just layering the ingredients in a bowl. We frequently make a large batch of quinoa and freeze it for later use, then pull it out the night before or morning we are having taco salad, and it makes the meal even quicker and easier.

If you’re looking for even more flavor and a fan then add some sour cream or plain greek yogurt to the taco sauce to make a creamier salad dressing. You could also add corn or the crumbs from the end of a bag of tortilla chips (or spill most of them on the floor attempted to pour them straight from the bag into your mouth 🙂 ).

Here’s the easy healthy quinoa taco salad recipe. You’ll love it and feel good about it. 🙂