Oregold Peaches Quinoa Salad (2024)

This Oregold Peaches Quinoa Salad is a delicious salad for any spring or summer party, or a great potluck dish! Double the recipe, because it goes fast!

I always love an orchard tour, especially when you see the luscious fruit just hanging there, ripe and ready for picking. I recently toured the Harry & David’s Royal Crest Orchard with Matt Borman, Director of Orchards, just as the Oregold Peacheswere hanging on the trees, ready for picking. So pretty!

I get giddy when I walk through an orchard, when the fruit is ripe, because I know what comes next!

What comes next is great food! Like this

Check out the video below – because this may just become your new favorite summer salad!

Not only does our family enjoy cobbler, peach jam, and the many peach desserts (shortcake, galette, pavlova, homemade ice cream), this time we experimented with a deliciousOregold Peaches Quinoa Salad. We’ve also made salsa, chutney, bruschetta, and bean dips with Oregold Peaches.

Before I share thisOregold Peaches Quinoa Saladrecipe, here are some facts about Harry & David’s Oregold Peachesthat I found fascinating:

-Harvesting these quality peaches goes from late July to late August, which means we’re in the prime harvesting time right now!
-There are 42 harvesters on 55 acres, solely working on peaches.
-Each peach is hand-picked once the color and size is perfect.
-Taking it a step further, here are some FUN facts about the orchard:
-Their harvest crews have to pass a color blind test so they can distinguish the right color of yellow and not green.
-Supervisors and crew leaders will call out “only the best color and size, like a melon or an egg yolk.” One crew leader who is an Oregon Duck fan says “like the yellow of the duck.” He’s not very popular with the Beaver fans. :)
-During the day, fruit is tested for sugar and maturity in the field to make sure theharvestersare picking only the ripest fruit.
-Theharvesterswill harvest over 400 tons of fruit before the peach season is over, which translates to around 400,000 pieces of fruit.

That’s a lot of peaches. And I’m happy I live here in the Rogue Valley, because we get to eat peaches every day all day!

Oregold Peaches Quinoa Salad

Our family was barbecuing last week and I whipped up this simple quinoa salad. We’ve been cooking with quinoa for years. I cook it in bulk in our rice cooker and store in the fridge so we have it available for salads, eggs (our boys love to add to their scrambled eggs), and Mexican dishes.

It’s a lovely grain, so subtle, yet so full of many options in how to cook with it. My friend, Ali, from Gimme Some Oven, has a great tutorial on how to cook quinoa, if you’re not familiar with it.