Five Bean Salad

Who wants to cook in the summer, right? So what can we eat? Oh! Legumes!

Protein, fiber, vitamins and minerals!

Very healthy stuff! Combine a few of them and they are very colorful too.

This is a great salad for a summer barbecue. Or just eaten by itself because its packed with flavor. Also this salad is easy peasy especially if your just buying all the beans precooked in jars or cans. If you live in the Americas you will be extremely lucky to have at your disposal a limitless variety of beans or, as they are called in some parts, frijoles So go ahead and find a nice variety of beans to put in your salad, Hey! you might even make a Six Bean Salad but that would be an entirely different instructable

A Kitchen

Nothing special: A knife, a chopping board, a bowl

Easy to remember too: 5 Beans, 3 Veg and 3 herbs

Here they are in order of appearance:

Kidney Beans

Colored Beans

Lentils

Chickpeas

Navy Beans

Cherry tomatoes, Sweetcorn, Spring onion

Basil, Mint, Coriander (Cilantro)

Salad dressing: Salt, Pepper, Oil, Vinegar, whatever you like

I'm not putting the quantities here because it doesn't matter. If you like tomatoes, put loads of tomatoes. If you like sweetcorn, put loads of sweetcorn. Its not like a recipe for baking a cake where you need the right amount of flour and baking powder to get it right. Here: YOU CAN'T GO WRONG

Strain off the all the beans and put them in a mixing bowl

I used fresh corn on the cob because I had it but a can of sweet corn works perfectly well

Chop the spring onion into small pieces. A red onion would be great for color here too

Rinse the cherry tomatoes

Throw everything in on top of the beans

Get loads of mint, loads of basil and loads of coriander(cilantro). But more coriander/cilantro than basil and more basil than mint because the mint is stronger than the basil and the basil is stronger than the coriander/cilantro

Rinse it well.

Cut off the bigger stalks.

And chop them all up as fine or as coarse as you like. I like fresh herbs to be chopped coarsely so that you can taste everything individually.

Mmm! The smell of fresh herbs. Fantastic!

Okay. Go ahead and throw them in on top of everything else.

Give it all a nice big mixing but be careful not to make a mush of the beans

Serve it up on plates with an extra leaf on top

I like to leave the dressing of the salad to each person. Some like it more salty, some like it more vinegary etc. So I put the oil and vinegar caddy on the table and let them help themselves

Bon Appetit!