Roasted Sweet Potato Quinoa Salad with Maple-Orange Dressing, walnuts, red onion, apple, dried cranberries, and goat cheese is an amazing healthy side dish to incorporate into any meal.
If you love sweet potatoes or quinoa salad recipes, I’m willing to bet you’ll enjoy this side dish so much that it’ll be on constant rotation in your house!
It has been for me!
In fact, I’ve been treating it more like a main dish than a side dish…it’s just that addicting!
This blog may as well be called “The Roasted Sweet Potato (with the occasional beet),” because lately, sweet potatoes are really the only root taking the lime light here.
I’m going to speak for you and go ahead and say you don’t mind.
You don’t mind, do you? Do you? Great!
The second you send me an email looking for more rutabaga recipes, I’ll change the name of this blog, I’ll get right on the rutabaga.
You may look at this quinoa salad with its sweet components – sweet potatoes, apples, cranberries, and maple-orange dressing – and think to yourself, “So…is this salad obnoxiously sweet? Is this salad actually dessert? Julia? Is it?”
Good question. The answer is, “no.”
There are definitely plenty of sweet elements to the salad, but it tastes nutty (on account of the walnuts and quinoa), tangy (on account of the goat cheese), zesty (on account of the dressing) with a little bite (on account of the red onion).
It also has a nice, warm element to it because I snuck cinnamon right into the dressing.
The main bullet point is this salad is well-balanced from a flavor and texture standpoint. It will be well-balanced from a nutritional stand point too if you added some form of complete protein (such as chicken) to it.
This quinoa salad got packed up in tupperware and went all the way to the mountains, into the wilderness, where cabins are built, campfires tell the greatest truth about life, bears definitely poop, and trees totally make sound when they fall.
My fellow mountaineers approved this salad with enthusiasm, but then again, they also approve of Nutter Butters, so you can take that statement with a grain of salt (or lots of grains, because salt makes everything better). No but really, this salad’s freaking amazing.
I’m going to sneak this in by being super discreet and not writing a big long run on sentence missing a bunch of comas immediately preceding the thing I want to sneak in so as to draw minimal attention to my sneakiness and I will neither bold nor italicize the sentence I’m trying to sneak past you, because that would be just plain obvious on my part. This is the best quinoa salad ever.
Wow, that worked.
More Delicious Sweet Potato Recipes:
- Roasted Sweet Potato Soup
- Gluten Free Sweet Potato Muffins
- Sweet Potato Scones with Zesty Orange Glaze
- Sweet Potato Veggie Burgers
- Silky Sweet Potato Pie (Gluten-Free)
- Sweet Potato Ginger Cookies
Also try my Mango Edamame Quinoa Salad, my Roasted Winter Vegetable Quinoa Salad, and my Pesto Quinoa Salad with Asparagus Avocado and Kale!
Roasted Sweet Potato Quinoa Salad
Ingredients
- 2 cups quinoa uncooked
- 1 large sweet potato chopped and roasted
- ¼ cup red onion sliced (about 1 loosely packed )
- 1 cup walnuts chopped
- 1 honey crisp apple peeled and chopped
- ½ cup dried cranberries
- 4 goat cheese
For the maple-orange dressing
- Zest of one orange
- 1 cup orange juiced (1/2 juice)
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- 1.5 tablespoons pure maple syrup
- ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt or to taste
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
- Chop the sweet potato into ½” cubes (I leave the peel on).
- Spread the sweet potato chunks on a baking sheet and drizzle them with enough olive oil to coat them. Sprinkle salt and pepper over everything.
- Roast in the oven for 30 minutes or until the sweet potato is cooked through and slightly crispy on the outside.
- While the sweet potato is roasting, bring 4 cups of water to a boil and add the quinoa. Return to a full boil, then immediately reduce the heat to a simmer, cover, and cook until all of the water is absorbed, about 15 minutes. Fluff quinoa with a fork.
- Whisk together all of the ingredients for the maple-orange dressing in a small bowl.
- In a large serving bowl, add the cooked quinoa and pour all of the maple-orange dressing over the quinoa. Toss together.
- Add the remaining salad ingredients and toss everything together.
- Consume the best quinoa salad ever.
This is the best salad I have ever tasted:D Thank you so much, I whipped it up for Christmas lunch last year (aussie here haha) and it was a massive hit. I’m pretty much addicted to it now and make it all the time. (Now I’m like the salad queen with this baby- every one I have made it for has begged for the recipe and I’ve sent them your way:D)
You rock! Thank you for changing the way my tastebuds see life:D
(Oh I do also sneak in a bit of sliced orange too- and I never have goats cheese, so I just use Danish fetta).
Oh and I also add a little fresh baby spinach for a little green factor 🙂
I have had this recipe pinned to my Salad board for a while, and finally made it. I love it so much I’ve force fed it to several of my coworkers and they’ve in turn forced me to send them to this link.
Thank you so much!
Prepared and ate this New Year’s Day. Truly amazing – salad is bursting with tons of flavors and it’s so healthy. I added a little smoked turkey my husband cooked from the grill and it just added another little dimension of “holy cow”. I will definitely make this again. Thank you, Julia!
YEAAAAH! I’m so glad you made it, Jennifer! I love that recipe…it’s one that never gets old for me! The addition of smoked turkey sounds fabulous, too! Happy New Year, and thanks again! 🙂
I’m going to make this tonght to test it out. I want to take it to a carry-in soon. Is it meant to be served warm or cold?? And can I make it ahead?? If so…any idea how long it will keep?? Can’t wait!!
This sounds fabulous! I was so excited when I saw the recipe name, delirious as I scrolled through this pics, and then … I got to the recipe itself and saw the goat cheese … I think that’s when I actually drooled a little (em-bar-a-ssing!). Showstopper! Love, love!
Anyone who minds the extra sweet taters can take it up with me. And by “me”, I mean “my trainer boyfriend”, because muscles.
Yum Julia! This looks fresh and delicious! Your photos are beautiful! I can just imagine grabbing that fork and putting a spoonful into my mouth!
oh man, i could eat just that dressing. Looks delicious!
You my dear are the salad QUEEN. You can’t go wrong with sweet taters and goat cheese!
what?! flavorally isn’t a word?! shoot. You are the queen of roasted roots 🙂 and I just happened to buy 2 rutabaga’s! Muahaha. This salad looks plain delicious, and hello that cinnamon! Amazing girl. I’m always so excited to see what you’ve cooked up next!
This salad looks so healthy and scrumptious, Julia! Love those cozy fall flavors!
I fully support the name change, mostly because these are all my favorite foods. Best quinoa salad ever, huh? Gotta make this 🙂
Yooooou’ll love it!!
This looks so good! I love salads like this – perfect for lunch leftovers! Will definitely be trying it!
Glad to hear it Maria! Let me know what you think.
Sweet potato AND quinoa?? This is right up my alley! And I looove the fall inspired photos–so pretty!
PS: I finally see why I couldn’t comment before–I couldn’t see the box for the math problem! HOORAY! 🙂
Haha! You’re definitely not the first person to have issues with my captcha…I hear it can give people quite the math problem. 87 * 789? What? I just want to leave a comment! Yeaaaah, I should put a disclaimer on this site that a calculator may be necessary in order to navigate through it 😉
So pretty, so many awesome flavors and so healthy! I love it! Oh and I love the roasted sweet potato! 🙂