Bean & Lentil Salad

I made this bean salad to take with me to Sheephouse Falls tomorrow and it's very good so I wanted to document the recipe so we can make it again. It was inspired by our homegrown green beans along with the fact that we already had the other ingredients on hand.

Bean & Lentil Salad

Bean Mixture

3 cups cooked lentils
1 1/2 cups cooked black turtle beans
1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas
1 1/2 cups fresh green beans cut in 1" lengths, and cooked until tender
1/2  cup chopped scallions
1/3 cup white onion, chopped fine

Vinaigrette

10 sprigs of fresh parsley, stemmed and chopped
5 tbsp white vinegar
5 tbsp vegetable or olive oil
5 tsp white sugar
2 tsp lemon juice
1/8 tsp black pepper
1 tsp salt or to taste

Mix the vinaigrette in with the bean mixture until everything is coated. Refrigerate overnight.

Protein

You may notice I use lentils in a lot of our dishes. A lot of people ask us where we get our protein and honestly, I get a lot of mine from lentils. We throw them into everything; gravies, sauces, soups, roasted veggies, salads, burgers...pretty much anything. We also eat beans quite a bit, especially in our Mexican food, which we have quite often.

Here is a breakdown of the protein in this salad. Mind you, this in in the entire salad, but even a 1-cup serving would have a substantial amount of protein.

3 cups lentils 54 g
1 1/2 cups black turtle beans 58.5 g
1 1/2 cups chickpeas 58.5 g
1 1/2 cups green beans 3 g

8 cups of food containing 174 g of protein. That amounts to 21.75 g per cup.

How much protein is enough?
They say you should have 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight daily. That means that most adults would need between 70-100 g of protein per day. Getting 1/5 to 1/4 in just one cup of bean salad is a great start to meeting the requirement.