Cucumber salad recipe: How to make an tasty & easy salad that stays fresh | Herbalife Recipes

Описание: I'm Susan Bowerman, registered dietitian. If you've never had a cucumber salad, you may be surprised at how good it can be. Today, I'm going to show you how to make a quick and delicious cucumber salad with just a few ingredients.

Not only does it taste great, but this cucumber salad is practically calorie-free and it stays nice and crispy for a few days in the refrigerator if you don't eat it all up the first day.

So let's show you how to do it.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to start with 4 large fresh cucumbers. I'm using regular cucumber if you want to you can use the Persian variety. These are smaller and don't usually require pealing. Because the peals are kind of thin but I'm going to go ahead and peal mine. So to get started I'm going to cut the end off my cucumber and instead of peeling all of it I'm going to peel it in little stripes and the reason I do that is because there is some flavor in the skin and also it makes your salad kind of pretty when you are done.

Now the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to slice my cucumber thinly. Now you have a couple choices here you can do it with a knife if you want to but it's kind of tedious because you want to get it real thin so you can see if your box grater that you have at home has one of these handy slicing tools on the side which is great. And I'm just going to put it right here into the bowl and I'm just going to go ahead and start slicing my cucumbers. And if you look at it you can see I'm getting some nice thin slices.

So I'm going to go ahead and peel and slice my 4 cucumbers.

Ok so now I got all my cucumbers sliced and at this point we are going to add some veggies and some herbs now the main thing here is that if you are going to add additional vegetables to your cucumber salad you want to make sure you cut them just as thinly as the cucumber that way they'll all have the same texture.

So what I'm going to add here is just some very thinly sliced red onions. I like the combination of the red onion with the cucumber it's pretty. And then for my herb I'm going to go ahead and use some cilantro. And then the next thing we are going to do is we are going to put on the dressing on the salad. And this is really easy because the dressing doesn't have to be mixed ahead of time you can just put all the ingredients on top and toss it because it's going to go in the refrigerator.

So there's basically 4 parts to my dressing. I'm going to use something acid I'm going to use something sweet I'm going to use something salty and I'm going to use something a little bit peppery.

That's one of the reasons why this salad is so good because you are stimulating all of your taste buds with all of these flavors.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add for my sour or my tart is I'm going to use lemon juice. And by the way if you want to see this entire recipe you can go to discovergoodnutrition.com and we will post the amounts on there and then for my sweet I'm going to use agave syrup for my salt I'm just using regular old table salt. And for my heat I'm going to add some red pepper flakes these are just some dried red pepper flakes. You can use as much or as little as you want but I'll just caution you these things are pretty hot so I'm going to go a little bit easy if you like things a little spicy you can put some more on there.

And that's it and now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to toss this gently together just to kind of get the flavors to blend before I put it in the refrigerator. And what you are going to see is when it sits in the refrigerator for 30 minutes or so not only is this going to allow the flavors to blend but it's going to give up a little bit of liquid and it will be a little easier to toss before you serve it. So I'm just going to cover up my cucumber salad and I'm going to put it in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. If it stays longer that's fine. And this is going to give the flavors a chance to blend and you're also going to see that the cucumbers are going to give up quite a bit of liquid. So here's my salad I made this one previously and if you take a look at it you can see there's quite a bit of liquid in the bowl and the cucumbers themselves there still crispy they've gotten a little bit softer and everything's blended up pretty nicely but they still have a nice crunch to them and they are going to be so good and they can stay like this in the refrigerator for a few days which is great.

For more nutrition advice from Herbalife visit http://www.DiscoverGoodNutrition.com or take a look at my YouTube playlist: http://hrbl.me/VJ6XEl.