Magazine Challenge: Chicken, Rice, and Black Bean Salad

So.
I actually made this in the summer.  You know, when tomatoes were lovely looking, vine ripened, and a decent price.  I'm often looking for lunch-type things for J and I to eat.  While I could go with scrambled eggs or soup (even in summer), he's not quite that into the small lunch.  So I look for things that might work for a couple of days and don't involve my having to cook all the time.
Enter this salad.  It looked refreshing and simple, and would last for a couple of days.  I was right.  J and I both enjoyed it as something different for lunch.
From the June 2005 issue of Everyday Food, I present to you now Chicken, Rice and Black Bean Salad:

Ingredients:

1 cup rice, uncooked
1 cooked chicken, shredded
1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
6 plum tomatoes, seeded and sliced
4 green onions, sliced
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced
1/4 c white wine vinegar
3 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp ground cumin
Salt and pepper to season

Method:
1.  Cook rice and cool. 
2.  In a large bowl, combine cooled rice, chicken, beans, tomatoes, green onions and chile.  Stir together vinegar, oil and cumin.  Toss with salad before seasoning with salt and pepper.
3.  Serve immediately, or refrigerate up to 1 day.

From Everyday Food, June 2005

For this, I ended up buying a whole chicken on sale, roasting it myself and using the meat.  I would recommend this option.  I looked at prepared roasted chickens, but they're were crazy expensive to my way of thinking.  Likewise, I thawed black beans I cooked myself in the crockpot.  I highly recommend that too.  No weird goo to rinse off your beans.

The beauty of summer is the fresh produce.  Heh.  This is my old sink.  So funny that I'm still blogging pictures of the sink that went out my front door in July.
We both liked the jalapeno in this recipe.  Not overpowering, but a nice little bite.

And there's our salad.  There was enough for two lunch sized servings, and there was very little work to put it together.  But a great refreshing meal for summer.