This is effectively a very different take on a ‘green’ salad. But rather than the normal flamboyant ubiquitous leafy affair, this is more of a sort of tapas. It goes well with crusty bread, flatbreads, a seedy sourdough…and together it makes a good enough lunch, the walnuts providing a good shot of protein.
Grape and cucumber salad with walnuts
Serves two for lunch with crusty bread, or four as part of a tapas spread, or an accompaniment to fish or chicken.
Serves – 2
Ingredients
- 1 small cucumber (the knobbly type ideally, which has more flavour)
- 250g/1 cup yoghurt – not the really thick kind, The Collective is perfect
- 2-3 spring onions, snipped, including about 1”/3 cm of the green bit; or alternatively a fat clove of garlic, peeled and crushed
- 50g/1 cup of walnut halves
- About eight mint leaves
- 1 tsp cumin seeds
- ½ tsp textured salt, plus more for sprinkling
- 250g/8 oz seedless white grapes
- Walnut oil to drizzle
Instructions
- Using a potato peeler, peel strips off the cucumber. Save the strips and put them in a jug with some iced water to drink with the salad.
- Cut the cucumber in half lengthwise. Scoop out the seeds with a teaspoon. Then dice the remaining cucumber flesh, put it in a sieve, sprinkle over a little salt and leave in the sink.
- In a small frying pan dry fry the cumin seeds.
- In a medium-sized pretty bowl mix the yoghurt, and spring onions or garlic. Snip in most of the mint leaves. Add the dry fried cumin seeds (crush them in a pestle and mortar if you have time).
- Dry fry the walnut halves, while you cut the grapes in half. Add the grapes to the yoghurt mixture.
- Roughly chop the walnuts. Add most to the yoghurt. Squeeze out the cucumber, and add that also to the yoghurt mixture.
- Serve garnished with the remaining snipped mint leaves and walnut pieces, and a drizzle of walnut oil if you have it.
