Roasted Sweet Potato Quinoa Salad with Maple-Orange Dressing

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!

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Roasted Sweet Potato Quinoa Salad

Yield: 8 Servings

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cook Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 40 minutes

One of my personal favorites, this Roasted Sweet Potato Quinoa Salad with Maple-Orange Dressing is an incredible side dish to any main entrée!

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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

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
2. Chop the sweet potato into ½” cubes (I leave the peel on).
3. 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.
4. Roast in the oven for 30 minutes or until the sweet potato is cooked through and slightly crispy on the outside.
5. 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.
6. Whisk together all of the ingredients for the maple-orange dressing in a small bowl.
7. In a large serving bowl, add the cooked quinoa and pour all of the maple-orange dressing over the quinoa. Toss together.
8. Add the remaining salad ingredients and toss everything together.
9. Consume the best quinoa salad ever.

Nutrition Information

Yield 8 Serving Size 1 Serving
Amount Per Serving Calories 345Total Fat 16gUnsaturated Fat 0gCarbohydrates 44gFiber 5gSugar 10gProtein 9g