One thing we love about summer is that mint grows like crazy in our garden. Cute W loves mint in his lemonade.
This year especially, the girls have been crazy for an old recipe, minted cucumber salad. I first found it on the same page as this Curried Chicken recipe in Cooking Light. The chicken is a very easy recipe. Actually, the first time I ever made it, it was a bit of a pain in the neck because the most labor-intensive part is the homemade mango chutney. I compared the homemade chutney to a jar of chutney, and I decided that it just wasn’t worth the effort. So now I buy the chutney and the chicken’s easy! Then I’ll often throw some random vegetables as well as some chickpeas and cashews and another jarred Indian sauce.
I couldn’t find the exact same salad recipe that I’ve been following all these years–the closest I got was this one, which isn’t too close. So here’s the original Katherine Cobbs/Cooking Light recipe, all typed in for you.
Minted Cucumber Salad
- 2 cups seeded, chopped cucumber
- 1/4 cup chopped red onion
- 3 T chopped fresh mint
- 1 cup plain yogurt
- 2 T rice vinegar
- 1 t sugar
- 1/2 t salt
- 1/2 t black pepper
Throw in all your cucumbers, onions, and mint. . . .
Then add the yogurt, vinegar, sugar, and salt and pepper. When I’m making both the chicken and the cucumber salad, I like to put the chicken in the marinade and make the salad ahead of time, then stick it all in the fridge for a while before moving forward.
This salad is a great cooling salad to go along with a curry or anything spicy.
In the past I pretty much only made this meal in the summer. I don’t know about you, but I resent spending money on a little bundle of mint when I know how easy it is to grow. But this summer the girls have been so enthusiastic that I think I’m going to have to put some of our mint into pots to keep it inside and growing year-round.
