Cucumber Salad Recipe - Healthy Vegan Recipes On Video

Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re gonna make a really quick and easy cucumber dill salad. It’s gonna be really nice and yummy with some cucumber of course which is definitely healthy for your green vegetables are always good to get into your diet. And this one is gonna be great served on its own, on the side, maybe over some potatoes, maybe over some rice, however you like it. We’re gonna whip this up, it will be super easy. Alright! What I’m gonna start with is the sauce so that it can get the flavors coming together and then all we’re gonna do is chopped up some cucumber and put it on the sauce. Alright! So the base of this sauce is going to be lemon, lemon zest, lemon juice. Good stuff! Zest, you just take the skin off of the lemon with the zester or grater. Take the zest off first and then we’re going to juice the lemon into the bowl and I juice it through a strainer so I don’t have to worry about picking up the seeds, makes things a lot easier. So lemon juice, lemon zest in the bowl here. Next thing we’re gonna add is some garlic and I’m gonna pressed this because I wanna make sure I don’t get any chunks of raw garlic in my mouth. So see how nicely that presses through, just get that off and I usually use the skin that gets pressed through, in this case I’m not going to because again I don’t want big chunks of garlic in my mouth. Ok! So that’s that! Next thing I’m going to add is some coconut milk and this is gonna make it nice and creamy. Most of the time when you see a cucumber salad they’re gonna use a yogurt dressing but as a vegan I don’t use yogurt so what I do is use coconut milk. Now it is on its own pretty sweet, I’m not tangy like a yogurt but that’s where the lemon juice comes in, it’s going to help give this a nice tanginess like we would have with a yogurt. Ok! Next thing I’m gonna add is some ground pepper, grind it right in there. Along with some onion powder and my local herb shop does this really great onion powder that I love, that was probably too much. It’s ok! If you can’t find any good onion powder, I would maybe use some chop onion or maybe make your own onion powder. You can do that by dehydrating an onion and then grinding it up. Ok! Then we’re gonna add our star ingredient, the dill. And this is some dried dill, if you have fresh that would be lovely but I don’t have any so I’m using dry. Good enough! Ok! Give that a good mix around, if you have any you can add some nutritional yeast. It adds a really great flavor and a bit of a yellowy color. I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for but anyway that’s what’s gonna do. So get that all stirred together. The last thing I’m gonna add into here is some sea salt and you don’t need very much for this recipe just a couple pinches, just enough to bring the flavors together coz this can get very salty very quickly with the onion powder. So once you have your sauce together this could actually marinate in the fridge for awhile if you like. The flavors will come together beautifully or you can just go right ahead and use it. This is actually made more than what I need because I’m making a pretty small salad tonight just for Phil and I going along with the rest of our meal. So what I’m gonna do rather than get out a new bowl to toss the salad and then put the leftover sauce into a container to save, I’m just gonna put the excess in a little plastic container that I can put on the fridge and then I’m gonna toss the salad in the bowl that I’ve use to make this dressing. Then I could always add back some if I need to. So what I’ve done is I’ve chopped up the cucumber and I used field cucumbers because I get some really nice ones around here. Field cucumbers do have a tougher skin than the English cucumbers, I leave the skin on because there’s a lot of a nutrient in the skin and I definitely recommend doing that. If you find that the field cucumber you find are too tough on the skin try when you have your cucumber whole, see if I can demonstrate this. If you slice off strips of the skin around so kind of take off half the skin but in little strips that might make it nicer or maybe just use an English cucumber until you can find nice field cucumber like I have here. I also had a bunch of nice celery on my fridge so I’m gonna add some of that to this salad and I will just give it a toss. So there’s my toss salad looking beautiful and green. This is definitely the kind of salad that is going to enjoy being marinated so if you want to pop this on the fridge for a few hours the flavors are just gonna soak right into those beautiful greens vegetables. And you can’t see it here probably but there is quite a bit of sauce at the bottom which if I’m serving this over (Let’s see if you can see it there, there! Yeah!) So if I’m serving this over potatoes or rice or something like that there’s gonna be a lot of beautiful sauce that I can drizzle over the greens at the bottom. Excellent meal! Delicious as a side dish as well, green vegetables again are great source of nutrients and help digest other foods so if you eat them in combination with some other foods its gonna go down really smoothly. So enjoy it! It is a great thing to have in the winter or the summer.