This Easy Bean Salad with Pecans is perfect for summer picnics or potlucks. It's made only with a handful of ingredients found in your pantry but has a really bright and vibrant flavour. It's healthy, filling, naturally gluten-free and vegan! Great for summer meal prep | imagelicious
Drain and rinse kidney beans. I use no salt added beans.
Place the beans into a large bowl and crumble pecans on top. You can chop the nuts as well, but I find that chopping them is quite messy as they usually try to escape from the cutting board, so I just use my hands to break them into smaller pieces.
Very finely chop the onion, it'll be about 1/4 cup of chopped onion, maybe a little bit less.
Finely mince dill and parsley. You'll get about 2 tablespoons of each herb.
Add onion and herbs to the bean and nut mixture.
Squeeze some lemon juice and add a tablespoon of oil. Add seasoning to taste and mix.
Notes
This goes very well with cilantro, but I know that many people don't eat cilantro and my husband is one of them, so I use other herbs. Sometimes just parsley or just dill, whatever you have on hand.
You can use walnuts instead of pecans too. In fact, walnuts are the more traditional way of making this salad in Georgia. I find that pecans provide a milder flavour than walnuts which I like more.
I use very little salt in my cooking and I find that lemon juice gives enough flavour and seasoning to the salad. I only used a tiny pinch of salt for this, so I can't say how much would work for you.
If you are making this in advance or big batch, then dress the salad right before serving as oil and lemon absorb into the beans and nuts and salad gets a bit dry the next day.