Israeli Couscous Salad

I finally found Israeli couscous today, in the surprising environs of my local Bulk Barn. Actually more of a pasta than a grain, I’d been wanting to try it for a while.

With cucumbers and cherry tomatoes still the freshest thing going, I didn’t hesitate to assemble this salad to go with grilled lamb chops.

Israeli Couscous Salad

2/3 cup Israeli couscous
1 cucumber
1 cup cherry tomatoes
2 tsp olive oil
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
freshly ground black pepper

1. Bring 4 cups of salted water to a boil. Add the couscous grains, stir, and let boil for 8 minutes. They should still be slightly chewy, but soft.
2. While the couscous is boiling, quarter and slice your cucumber, and quarter or roughly chop the cherry tomatoes. (It all depends on how hungry you are, and whether you’re serving it to company.)
3. Throw the cucumber and tomatoes in a bowl, top with the olive oil and vinegar, and give a good stir.
4. When it’s done, drain the couscous and add it immediately to the rest of the salad ingredients. Top with pepper and serve.

Like a pasta, Israeli couscous isn’t exactly a health food on its own. Half a recipe above costs 242 calories, or 4 Weight Watchers points. However, if it convinces you to eat more cucumber and tomato, I think that’s a good thing!

Black Bean and Summer Vegetable Salad

Black Bean and Summer Vegetable Salad

My next-door neighbour has been handing me cucumbers all month. One day we also got a dozen ears of corn, and recently cherry tomatoes have started coming over the fence from her too.

We ate this on its own as a light meal – the black beans add protein, and the corn is a starchy vegetable, so it’s almost complete on its own.

Black Bean and Summer Vegetable Salad

1/2 a cucumber
1 cup cherry tomatoes
1 ear corn, cooked (mine was leftover from a batch of barbecued ears)
1/2 can black beans
2 tsp olive oil
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
salt and pepper to taste

1. Chop the cucumber and tomato into quite small pieces.
2. Cut the corn kernels off the cob and add to the other vegetables.
3. Rinse and drain the black beans.
4. Add the olive oil and vinegar, and stir to combine. Add a little salt and pepper if you like.

I’m sure later in the season I’ll start adding herbs and spices to perk up the taste, but right now it tasted so fresh and delightful without that I wasn’t even tempted.

Half the recipe gives you 2 servings of vegetable for only 225 calories, or 4 Weight Watchers points. You’re also getting 7.5g of fibre, a good push towards your daily requirement. You can leave out the oil to bring it down to 185 calories and 3 points, but olive oil is good for you in small amounts like this.

Cucumber Salad

Vinegar taste test

My grandmother makes a couple of cool and refreshing cucumber salads, one vinegar-based and one milk-based. I’m always amazed by the number of vinegars that seem to proliferate in the kitchen, so I pulled them together to perform my own mini taste-test on which ones go best with cucumber.

To my surprise, after letting them sit for a couple of hours, the winner was the plain white vinegar, the one my grandmother always used! The rice wine vinegar came in second, with the slightly sweet flavour seeming a bit incongruous to me. The other three all overpowered the cucumber, and even though I usually like balsamic vinegar (especially on tomatoes), it didn’t do it for me here. Perhaps I’m not cut out to be a food writer.

On to the actual recipe. I’m adapting mine from an old Usenet post in December 1997 from Doris Stowe Weber, since it’s the closest I can find to what I remember my grandmother doing.

Cucumber Salad (the Vinegar one)

2 to 3 cucumbers, sliced (peeled partially if you like)
1 small white onion
white vinegar
water
salt and pepper
ice cubes

Slice cucumbers into a bowl – make them lie flat so they take up as little room as possible. Slice the onion into thin rounds and put them on top. Add a little salt and pepper. Pour vinegar in to come half-way up the cucumber and onion slices. Add water just until everything is covered, and put 7 or 8 ice cubes on top.

Let sit for at least an hour. If it’s still too tart when you start eating it (the ice cubes should soften the strong onion taste), stir in a bit of sugar.

As long as you don’t need to add sugar, this is a zero-point Weight Watchers food, and has negligible calories per serving.

Cucumber

Our next-door neighbour gave us some lovely cucumbers out of her garden. They’re what I think of as “normal” cukes, not the English kind that I mostly see in the grocery store; these are only about 8″ long and the same as the ones we used to grow when I was a kid.

When I buy an English cucumber, I usually use a peeler to take about half the peel off in long strips; it looks attractive and takes away some of the bitterness. These fresh cucumbers are so light and crisp there’s no need to peel them at all. Last night Mike cut one in half, then in wedges lengthwise, and they disappeared off the kitchen counter while dinner was cooking. I like to put a little salt and pepper on mine. They go particularly well with hamburgers, in my mind.

My favourite things to do with cucumbers include tzatziki, but you have to eat an awful lot of it to get a serving of vegetable; you’d max out your dairy for the day before you got a full serving of cucumber! When I was a child I would make cucumber sandwiches with mayonnaise and Wonder bread; a good example of making something healthy, rather less so.

If you’re having company, I’ve made a recipe from the LCBO a couple of times that doesn’t appear to be on their site now. Here it is:

Shrimp and Cucumber Bites
1 cucumber, sliced in rounds
1/4 cup mayonnaise (light is fine)
2 tsp wasabi paste (or more or less, depending on how strong yours is and how much you like it)
4 oz medium-sized cooked shrimp, peeled and tails off
2 or 3 red radishes

If you wish, peel strips off the side of the cucumber, or run a fork down it lengthwise to make a pattern. Cut the cucumber into fat rounds (I invariably count how many shrimp I have, and cut the into that many slices; it’s a good excuse to eat a shrimp or two to get a nice divisible number). If the cucumber seems very wet, or you have to let it sit a while before continuing, wipe the slices with a paper tower when you’re ready to finish.

Mix the mayonnaise and wasabi together, and dollop about a teaspoonful on each slice of cucumber. Put a shrimp on top of that and press it down a bit to stay put. Chop the radishes into tiny dice and sprinkle them on top; you can either use your teaspoon again and dribble a bit on each shrimp, or if you’re getting impatient you can put all the cucumber/shrimp bites on a plate and throw the radish over everything.

If you serve this to four people, each of you is getting at least one serving of vegetable. With light mayonnaise it’s only 86 calories per serving.

I particularly like this recipe because it’s cleverly substituting cucumber for crackers. I’m sure the idea could be extended to other appetizers, particularly any involving seafood or cream cheese, which seem to go well with cucumber.