Mediterranean Cucumber Salad - ☺♥

Here is a Middle Eastern type of recipe for a refreshing, creamy cucumber salad. While planning a new recipe for curried seafood, I remembered a cool and creamy cucumber salad with obvious dill overtones served to me at an Indian restaurant in Bad Homburg, Germany. It was delicious and the perfect companion to the more spicy lamb curry entree I had on that occasion. Thus, as I've experimented some with curry entree's here, I realized I could replicate that salad and the nice experience by finding something close on the Internet and making a few adjustments.

I did find a near perfect salad from the "Feasting at Home" blog, that needed only minor recipe adjustments for me to get what I wanted.

I hope you make this salad as it is both tasty and mild, not to mention rather easy to make. And yes, it is the perfect companion to serve with a wide variety of spicy foods, like hot wings or highly seasoned chili, as well as with more highly seasoned curry dishes.

Per the Internet recipe, the salad is also perfect for serving with Mediterranean style grilled meats, which to me means well seasoned. I've had fabulous grilled meat combinations, well seasoned, each uniquely, at "high end" Greek restaurants outside the USA, which are hard if not impossible to find in most of the USA. If you do a bit of recipe research on the Internet and experimenting in your kitchen and on your charcoal or gas grill, you can make those delicious grilled meats yourself.

Having learned that this salad, especially the sauce, is perfect for gyros I will make a suggestion for you to try. If you make the recipe below using only one English cucumber you will have extra sauce that will be perfect to use if you make gyros.

Have fun! Live well! Life is too short to ignore opportunities for great pleasure in eating. Avoid a constant diet of the more bland fare we typically encounter, based on limited experience and limited ingredients, and thus limited opportunity, coming from our ancestors via many common but boring, weakly seasoned recipes.

Ingredients: (6 to 8 servings)

2 large English cucumbers (or 8 small Persian cucumbers)

1/2 cup of softly packed fresh dill (large stems removed) - chopped

1/2 cup of softly packed fresh mint leaves (stems removed) - chopped

1/3 to 1/2 cup of finely sliced red salad onion

1/2 cup of plain Greek yogurt

3/4 cup of sour cream

1/4 cup of fresh lemon juice, (and perhaps more, later, to taste)

3 garlic cloves- finely minced

1 tsp. of Kosher salt (for extracting moisture from the cucumber slices)

1/2 tsp. of Kosher salt (to later season the salad)

1/4 tsp. of white pepper

1/2 tsp. of sugar

1 tbsp. of olive oil

2 tbsp. of water

Directions:

Rinse the cucumbers under cold water. If you are using English or Persian cucumbers with thin skins, cut off the ends but don't peel them. Otherwise, for ordinary domestic USA cucumbers, cut off the ends and peel off about half of the skin by making a series of alternating peeled vs. skin areas along the length of each cucumber with a potato peeler.

Note that some domestic cucumbers actually have to be washed with some soap and warm water first to remove a waxy residue coating used to help prolong shelf life at supermarkets. Beyond that, the skin of some domestic cucumbers is thicker and somewhat bitter, thus the recipe recommendation to use English or Persian cucumbers.

Use a mandolin or a sharp knife, and slice the cucumbers into thin uniform disks no more than 1/8" thick, and preferably a bit thinner, and place the slices in a colander.

Salt the cucumber slices with the one tsp. of Kosher salt, mixing the salt into the slices. Let moisture extract/drain from the cucumber slices for 30 minutes.

Spread the cucumber slices out on a few paper towels and use the same number of paper towels on top. Press gently to absorb moisture into the paper towels and to remove residual salt/brine.

Put the cucumber slices into a large (one gallon) bowl.

Toss in the chopped dill, the chopped mint and the thinly sliced onions.

Combine the rest of the ingredients - yogurt, sour cream, lemon juice, minced garlic, 1/2 tsp. of Kosher salt, white pepper, sugar, olive oil and water in a one quart bowl, and whisk them until the mixture is smooth, to make the dressing.

Pour the dressing over the cucumber pieces and stir gently but well with a wooden spoon to combine all ingredients evenly and to coat all cucumber slices.

Taste the salad for saltiness and also brightness from the lemon juice, adjusting either salt or lemon juice or both if necessary.

Refrigerate the salad, covered with plastic wrap, for at least three hours, before serving it in pre-chilled small salad bowls. Note that creamy salads of this general type improve considerably by refrigerating them overnight, as that allows the flavors to blend/integrate, yielding a great rather than simply good salad.

Enjoy!