Recipe #14 – Cucumber Salad

I recently found a recipe on Pinterest that sounded intriguing and very easy. It was a recipe for Cucumber Salad, which I’ve never had and figured it was an excuse to go add a new spice – Dill –  to my supplies. Yes, the recipe calls for fresh dill, but it’s Winter and hard to find around here right now, well, at least my supermarket didn’t have it. You can find the original recipe HERE and the Jo and Sue Blog looks good in general – check it out!

Ingredients

• 1 large cucumber
• 2 tsp coarse sea salt
• 1 Tbsp light sour cream
• 1 tsp finely chopped onion
• 1 tsp fresh dill, chopped
• 1 tsp vinegar
• 1 tsp sugar

Directions

• Peel your cucumber – or you can leave the peel on if you want – slice cucumber into fairly thin slices. Place into a colander and sprinkle with coarse sea salt. Set on something to catch the water that drains off, and set aside.
• Mix together sour cream, onion, dill, vinegar, and sugar. Cover and place in fridge.
• Let cucumbers drain and dressing chill for at least an hour, up to 2 hours.
• Before serving, rinse cucumbers under running water briefly. Pat dry with paper towel.
• Toss dressing with cucumbers and serve.

What I did, or How I may have screwed it up

Well, I started out following this recipe to the letter, but as I said before I didn’t have fresh dill so I improvised with dill from the spice section. Actually, the jar says dill weed… I hope it’s the same stuff. Anyway, I started cutting up a whole onion and thought that looked like rather a lot for just one cucumber so I only used half. Then of course it didn’t look like enough dressing so I added more sour cream, vinegar and sugar to taste.

I did the whole salt the cukes and drain thing, but no fluid drained and I didn’t really see the point. I only used half the salt and it wasn’t sea salt… it was kosher salt.  If I make this again I may skip this step. I’m supposed to watch my salt anyway.

And why wouldn’t I make this again? Well, it was delicious, awesome even, but I may have gone overboard on the dill weed. And the onions. The combination left a taste in my mouth that was so bad it disturbed my sleep, even after brushing my teeth. My mouth tasted like a swamp come morning. I loved this but man, the follow up is harsh.

So yeah, I may have screwed this one up royally folks. I liked it a lot, but I may leave out the onions and the salt if I make it again. I am still burping onions 24 hours later. Perhaps dill just isn’t my thing? Perhaps it’s my digestive system? Who knows? If you try this, let me know how you make out.

UPDATE:

I just re-read the recipe. Yup, I screwed this one up bigtime. It does not call for one finely chopped onion, but rather one tsp of finely chopped onion. A tsp as in TEASPOON. My bad. My very, very bad. Well, this is how we learn, right? I will make this again and see how it goes with somewhat less onion.