Jacques’ Cucumber Salad (but) with Onions

Cucumber salad, made Jacques Pepin’s way, stays crunchy for several days, making it a great make-ahead contribution for your next potluck or barbecue party. You’ll want to double or even quadruple this recipe for a crowd. 

This week Sunday Supper is going to a barbecue party and bringing along everything you need from drinks to salads to ribs (You gotta have the ribs!) to make it just perfect. I love a fresh dish, but sometimes time does not allow for in-the-moment creations. That’s where Jacques Pépin and his cucumber salad come to the rescue. In the chef’s own words, “The salt, you will discover, draws the juices from the cucumbers, making them limp, and, paradoxically, very crisp at the same time. Prepared this way, the cucumbers will stay crisp for several days.” And so they do.

Many thanks to our hosts today, Jennie from The Messy Baker and Melanie from Melanie Makes! This recipe is adapted from Jacques Pépin's Complete Techniques.

Ingredients
4 cucumbers – weight 1 1/3 lbs or 585g
1 1/4 teaspoons coarse salt – I used sel gris.
1/2 small purple onion – about 2 oz or 55g
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons sour cream
Freshly ground pepper
1 tablespoon peanut oil

Jacques’ ingredient list calls for three cucumbers, which he says will give you five cups sliced. I got two cups out of my four cucumbers so I don’t know where we went wrong but I reduced the rest of the ingredients proportionally to fit what I had. After all, you can’t salt two cups of cucumbers with the same salt that’s meant for five!

See? His aren't bigger than average. 

Method
Peel your cucumbers and cut them in half lengthwise. Scoop out the seeds with a spoon.

Cut them into slices about a 1/4 inch or 1/2cm wide.

Pop them into a colander, over a bowl to catch the juice. Sprinkle the cucumbers with salt and mix well. Allow to drain for at least an hour but preferably two, at room temperature.

Meanwhile, slice your half onion as thinly as you can manage and soak the slices in a small bowl in the lemon juice. Stir it occasionally as it sits.

When the time is up for the cucumbers, rinse them thoroughly under cold water and then press them lightly to get rid of excess water.

I laid them out briefly on some paper towels.

Mix the sour cream and the peanut oil into the lemon juice and onions, along with a good few grinds of fresh peppercorn.

Pour this mixture over the cucumbers and stir.

Jacques says more salt won’t be necessary and he is absolutely right. Because of the sour cream, refrigerate this salad if not eating immediately.

Enjoy!

Are you looking for more barbecue party recipes? Sunday Supper’s got you covered!

Beverages

• Best Wines For A Summer BBQ Party from ENOFYLZ Wine Blog
• Grilled Peach and Cinnamon Whiskey Sour from Peaceful Cooking
• How To Make Fresh Squeezed Lemonade from Life Tastes Good
• Pineapple Margaritas from The Messy Baker
• Stone Fruit Sangria from Because I Like Chocolate
• Strawberry Lemonade from Basic N Delicious

Appetizers

• BBQ Stuffed Calimari from Jane's Adventure in Dinner

Sides and Accompaniments

• Cucumber Salad with Blackberry Browned Butter Vinaigrette from Nik Snacks
• Easy Fruity Salad from Hot Momma's Kitchen Chaos
• Grilled Corn on the Cob with Lime Butter from The Redhead Baker
• Jacques' Cucumber Salad with Onions from Food Lust People Love
• Mango Peanut Slaw from The Texan New Yorker
• Mom's Classic Macaroni Salad from Webicurean
• Roasted Strawberry BBQ Sauce from Bobby's Kozy Kitchen
• Two Tomato Chutney from What Smells So Good?

Main Dishes

• Asian-Style Pasta with Gochujang Peanut Sauce from Wallflour Girl
• Barbecue Ribs from girlichef
• BBQ Stuffed Peppers from Small Wallet, Big Appetite
• Bistecca from Confessions of a Culinary Diva
• Competition Baby Back Ribs with Apple-Bourbon Barbecue Sauce from Crazy Foodie Stunts
• Grilled Cedar Plank Salmon from That Skinny Chick Can Bake
• Grilled Clams with Chorizo from Noshing With The Nolands
• Grilled Sanma from A Mama, Baby & Shar-pei in the Kitchen
• Grilled Shrimp with Lemon Basil from Nosh My Way
• Grilled Swordfish and Eggplant with Fusilli and Tomatoes from Cooking Chat
• Grilled Wings from Hezzi-D's Books and Cooks
• Lemon Oregano Spatchcock Chicken from Kudos Kitchen by Renee
• Mango Beef Kebabs from Curious Cuisiniere
• Steak Skewers with Chimichurri from Jelly Toast
• Sweet and Tangy Blueberry BBQ Chicken Pizza from Simply Gourmet

Desserts

• Amazing S'mores 7-Layer Bars from Flavor Mosaic
• Banana Pudding Pie from A Kitchen Hoor's Adventures
• Blackberry Cake from Peanut Butter and Peppers
• Blueberry and Raspberry Galette from Rhubarb and Honey
• Farm Stand Blackberry Buckle from The Wimpy Vegetarian
• Grilled Peach Crumble from Try Anything Once Culinary
• Grilled Peaches with Mascarpone Cream and Sweet Balsamic Syrup from La Bella Vita Cucina
• Hot Fudge Ice Cream Pie from Melanie Makes
• Lemon Ricotta Bars from The Foodie Army Wife
• Old Fashioned Sour Cherry Pie from Pies and Plots
• Pineapple Upside Down Cake from Take A Bite Out of Boca
• S'mores Chocolate Cookie Cups from Cupcakes & Kale Chips

Ceviche - As it should be

Many a thing is called ceviche out in the world of restaurants. Some add tomatoes or avocado or mango or other abominations. I’ve even seen grapes! This dish is made exactly as I remember it from my childhood time spent in northern Peru, with fresh seafood, fresh lime juice, purple onions, cilantro, salt and chili peppers. That’s it. And boiled yucca on the side. 

About a year after my parents divorced, my father moved from Venezuela where we had all been living together, to a small oilfield company town in northern Peru called Negritos. If you’ve been in the mountains and the rain forests of Peru but never ventured to the northwestern coast, you might be surprised to find sand dunes to rival those in my current home, the United Arab Emirates. Negritos is set near the most western point of mainland South America, Punta Pariñas, with a beautiful coast in front and a massive desert at its back. I spent every summer there for several years, until Daddy moved again.

I don’t know that it was much of a place for being an adult but it was heaven for a child. I’d take off for hours, exploring rocks and sand dunes and crevasses, finding shells and fossils, building forts with the neighbor kids and “tightrope” walking on the pipes between the enormous town water tank and, well, town. (Shhhh! Don’t tell my father – the pipeline was strictly off limits.) My older sister and I shared a little blue Honda 70 motorbike and sometimes I’d ride the dunes on it, but most days, exploration was on foot and I’d often carry pen and paper, in case inspiration struck and I needed to write something down. I was deep into my Harriet the Spy phase then. Returning home, I’d drive my stepmother to distraction by taking off my shoes and socks and making two little piles on my bedroom floor with the sand that had accumulated in them. It was fun to see how big the piles were some days, as if it told me how far I had walked somehow. In retrospect, I must have been a strange child.

A big treat - I’m telling you it was a small town! – was to go to the small airport in the next town over and eat in the restaurant there. I’ll let you absorb that. We went to the airport just to eat. Watching the planes take off and land was a bonus. I always, and I mean always, without fail, ordered the shrimp ceviche. It was perfect. A healthy plateful of shrimp, swimming in lime juice with lots of sliced onions and just enough chili. The resulting liquid is called leche de tigre or tiger’s milk and when all the shrimp were gone, I’d sip it with a spoon and nibble on the boiled yucca that was always served alongside.

My father’s company also had a very rustic, open plan brick house on a beautiful beach called Punta Sal, which we were able to use on weekends and holidays. It was even farther north, in fact, about halfway to the Ecuadorian border. There we’d make our own ceviche, with fresh grouper hooked from the water by a local fisherman called Polo. Burnished and wizen by too many years in the fierce sun, Polo lived in a makeshift shanty right on Punta Sal and made his living fishing off of a raft of old logs bound together by frayed rope and luck. He'd come door-to-door with his daily catch and often let the more adventurous boys (my husband among them) "help" him fish.

When I eat this ceviche and I close my eyes, I can hear the waves crashing, smell the sea breeze and feel the dried crusty salt left behind by the water, tight on my sunburned skin. Hope you do too. (Sometimes I even smell jet fuel, but that one's probably just me.)

Ingredients
6 -7 limes or more if yours aren’t very juicy. You need about 1 cup or 240ml juice.
13 oz or 370g fresh firm white flesh fish – I used Hammour or local grouper
1 large purple onion (about 3 1/2 oz or 100g, before peeling)
1 teaspoon flakey sea salt or to taste, plus more for boiling the shrimp
1 large bunch cilantro or coriander leaves (About 1 3/4 oz or 50g)
1-2 hot red chili peppers (I used two!)
12 1/3 oz or 350g fresh shrimp, already cleaned and deveined

To serve: The traditional accompaniment to a bowl of ceviche is yucca, boiled till tender in lightly salted water. Try to get your hands on some – it’s called different things in a variety of countries: Manioc, cassava, mogo, manioc and aipim, just to name a few. Peel it and wash it well before boiling. Once boiled, split it down the middle and pull out the fibrous threads before serving. Its flavor is somewhere between a potato and a parsnip and the mild taste and starchiness counterbalances the acidic, spicy ceviche.

Method
Juice your limes and put them in a non-reactive bowl. Glass does nicely.

Remove all the bones and cut your fish up into bite-sized pieces. I use jewelry pliers to get the pin bones out.

Immerse the fish in the lime juice and stir well.

Wash the cilantro thoroughly with cold water. Sometimes it takes more than one rinse to get rid of all the dirt but it’s worth taking the time to make sure it’s completely grit free. Spin the cilantro dry in a salad spinner or tied up in a dish towel. You can discard the stems but as long as they aren’t really thick and hard, I like to mince them very finely and use them. Chop the leaves roughly and set aside.

Slice your onions as thinly as you can manage and mince your red chilies.

Add the onions and the chilies to the fish along with the sea salt. Give everything a good stir and use your spoon, preferably a wooden one, to poke the pieces of fish back into a single layer under the lime juice.

Pile your chopped cilantro on top of everything but don’t stir yet. Just let it all hang out.

Bring a pot of water to the boil. Add a little salt, just as you would do for boiling pasta.

Add the shrimp to the pot and turn the heat off. Put a lid on the pot and set a timer for about three minutes. This parboils the shrimp but they will finish "cooking" in the lime juice.

When the time rings, remove the shrimp with a slotted spoon. Let them cool slightly and then add them to the bowl with the fish.

Now you can give it a good stir. Poke the bits of fish back under the lime juice.

Cover the whole bowl with cling film and refrigerate, stirring occasionally, for several hours or until the fish is completely opaque and “cooked” by the lime juice. I left mine overnight because it was going sailing with us the next day. If you are traveling with ceviche, make sure to keep it on ice until you are ready to serve it.

Serve with boiled yucca for a traditional treat. (See note with the ingredients list above.)

Enjoy!

Broccoli Chicken Couscous Salad

Lean chicken breasts pan-fried till golden, lightly steamed broccoli, tomatoes and radishes in a quick lemon yogurt dressing with red chili makes a tasty, healthy meal after weeks of indulgence. 

This salad is made up of the vegetables I had on hand so please use the ingredient amounts as a guide and feel free to substitute your favorites, add more or omit whatever doesn’t suit you.

Ingredients (to serve two as a main course or four as a starter)
For the salad:
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
Sea salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
Olive oil
1 cup or 150g couscous (medium grain)
1/2 medium-sized head of broccoli
9-10 small sharp radishes
9-10 cherry tomatoes
1/2 cup or about 50g sprouted mung beans
Large handful cilantro or fresh coriander leaves

For the dressing:
Juice 1/2 large lemon (about 1/8 cup or 30ml)
1 small purple onion
1-2 small hot red chilies
2 heaping tablespoons plain yogurt
1/8 cup or 30ml olive oil
Sea salt

Method
Cut your chicken into bite-sized pieces and season liberally with salt and the ground cumin.  Stir it around so the pieces are seasoned all over.

Heat up a non-stick skillet and pan-fry the chicken until golden on all sides using just a tiny drizzle of olive oil.   Remove from the heat and allow to cool.

Put a pot of water on to heat for steaming your broccoli.

Cut the broccoli into florets then cut the florets in quarters.

Steam them until they are still crunchy.  This takes just a few minutes.  Remove your steamer with broccoli from the hot pot and set aside to cool.  Reserve the water for making the couscous.

Put your couscous in a pot or metal bowl and add a 1/2 teaspoon of salt.  Add just enough boiling water (From the broccoli steaming pot, if you’ve plan ahead!) to cover the couscous plus a bit extra.  Put the lid on and leave it while you get on with the rest of the salad.

Slice your radishes and halve your cherry tomatoes.  Chop the cilantro very roughly.  You want some nice big leaves still.  Finely mince the red chilies and thinly slice your onion.

In a bowl that will be big enough for tossing your whole salad, add in lemon juice, the onion and the chilies.  Let them steep for a few minutes.  This takes the sharpness out of the onion and infuses the juice with the heat of the chilies.

Add in the plain yogurt and stir.   Now drizzle in the olive oil and stir well.  Give the whole thing a small sprinkle of salt.  Set aside.

By now your couscous should be done.  Remove the lid and fluff it up with a fork.  Leave the lid off and allow it to cool further.

Add your radishes, tomatoes and mung beans to the salad bowl.

Heap on the couscous.

Toss well to coat everything with dressing.  Now add in cooled broccoli and the cilantro.  Toss again.

Finally, add in the chicken pieces and toss for the last time.

Enjoy!

Poached Salmon with Creamy Caper Onion Sauce

Whenever I get home from a holiday, I reminisce by looking through my photos and remembering all the people I’ve met or visited with and all the places I’ve been.  I also reminisce about the meals I have eaten.  I’m going back through my summer photos of food because there are so many dinners and salads and desserts that got made, photographed and eaten with relish, but never got posted.  I am not even home yet and I am already feeling nostalgic for wild salmon, which I have yet to find in Cairo.

Wild salmon is much drier than its farm-raised brethren so poaching is an excellent method of cooking it.   Add on a creamy caper onion sauce and you can’t go wrong.   I cooked this, along with a cherry tomato tart, for my in-laws and it was very well received.  My father-in-law has been ill and had not been eating very well for a couple of weeks when I served this and he cleaned his plate!  We were all very excited.  Seriously.  To the point that we took a photo of his empty plate.  Looking back now, that seems weird, but it felt right at the time.  Any small victory!

Butterflied Chicken with Rosemary and Lemon

As I mentioned back when I wrote the post about Rosemary Lemon Chicken Stroganoff, this is one of my favorite meals to make for guests.  This is also one of my favorite meals to make when it’s just us.  My original post didn’t include photos of the first recipe since the focus was what to do with the leftovers, so I thought I would document making the rosemary lemon chicken itself as I made it the other night.  Two chickens so we would have leftovers again!  You should do the same.

Ingredients  

2 whole chickens, cleaned and trimmed of extra fat

6 long sprigs fresh rosemary or more to taste. 

2 lemons

2 purple onions

Olive oil

Maldon or other flakey sea salt

Black pepper

Method

Using a sharp knife or kitchen scissors, cut along the backbone of each chicken.

Turn the chicken over and press down on the breast to spread it flat.

Put the chickens into a large freezer bag.

The 2 1/2 gallon Hefty bags work great. (The link says 2.5 Qt. mistakenly.
The jumbo bags are really 2.5 Gallon.  Get your act together, Hefty!) 

Pull the needles off of the sprigs of rosemary and throw them in the bag with the chicken.

Cut your lemons in quarters and pop them into the bag.  Squeeze them from outside so the rinds and juice stay in the bag. 

Cut your purple onions in quarters and add them to the bag.

Sprinkle in the sea salt and black pepper.  Pour in olive oil and then close up the Ziploc and give the whole bag a good mix around.

Try to distribute the lemons and onions farily around and then open the zipper just a little and squeeze out as much air as possible, before closing the zipper again.

Marinate chicken for a couple of hours in the refrigerator, or overnight—even a couple of days.  (Or freeze it.  Just make sure to thaw and bring the chicken to room temperature before roasting.)

Preheat oven to 425°F or 220°C.  Once the chicken is at room temperature, dump the whole bag out into a baking pan which has been drizzled with a little olive oil.

Redistribute the lemon and onions pieces around the chicken and put some of the rosemary on top.  Drizzle the chicken liberally with more olive oil.

Roast for 45 minutes.  Serve with bits of onion and even lemon, if your fellow eaters are willing.  My mother-in-law is the only person I know who will eat the roasted lemons but there are surely more people in the world who would and I just haven’t met them.  Anyhow, they look pretty on the plate. 

I serve this with couscous and use all the lovely lemony drippings off the chicken to further moisten the couscous on the plate. 

Enjoy!

N.B. This recipe was created by Nigella Lawson. The original can be found in this book and you should buy one because it is full of wonderful recipes, written by one of my food heroes.