Cucumber Tomato Salad
Mediterranean chopped salad — cucumber, tomato, red onion, and a lot of parsley, dressed with nothing but olive oil, lemon, salt, and pepper. Fifteen minutes of knife work and no cooking. Good with pita and hummus, alongside marinated meats, or as the vegetable half of a prep container.
Ingredients
Instructions
- Quarter the cucumbers lengthwise, then cut across into 1/2-inch chunks.
- Dice the tomatoes to match the cucumber.
- Combine the cucumber, tomato, onion, and parsley in a serving bowl. Add the olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.
- Toss thoroughly. Taste and adjust the salt, pepper, and lemon.
Notes
- Persian cucumbers, not English or slicing. Thin skin, few seeds, and firm enough that they don't go limp — the whole texture of the salad depends on it.
- Roma tomatoes for the same reason: dense and low-moisture. A ripe beefsteak or heirloom tastes better on day one and floods the bowl by day two.
- Cut everything to the same size. It's a chopped salad, so every forkful should get all four things.
- Parsley is an ingredient here, not a garnish. 1 1/2 oz. is roughly a large supermarket bunch, and it should look like too much.
- If raw red onion is too sharp for you on day one, soak the dice 10 min in cold water and pat dry. In a batch that sits dressed, this sorts itself out — the lemon and salt pickle the onion and it mellows by day two.
- The source says 2 days. That's a texture call, not a safety one; see below.
Meal prep
- One batch on Sunday, dressed all at once, one airtight container, eaten with lunch through the week. 1 1/2x the recipe makes 6 servings: 1 1/2 lb. each cucumber and tomato, 1/2 lb. red onion, a scant 2 1/2 oz. parsley, 3 Tbsp. each olive oil and lemon juice, a scant 1/2 tsp. each salt and pepper.
- Salt draws water out of the cucumber and tomato, so liquid pools in the container from day two on. Stir before scooping, or pour it off — it's good pita-dipping juice either way.
- Texture is what fades, not safety. Days 1–3 are crisp, days 4–6 are softer and more pickled, and the flavor deepens the whole time as the onion and parsley bleed into the dressing.
- Two things buy you the back half of the week: Persian cucumbers and Roma tomatoes (both low-moisture), and dicing at a full 1/2 inch. Smaller dice is more surface area and it goes soft faster.
- Season a little under on Sunday. Salt keeps drawing out water all week and the dressing concentrates as it does — it tastes saltier on Friday than it did on Sunday. Adjust in the bowl at lunch.
Nutrition
- Serving size
- about 1 c.
- Calories
- 118
- Protein
- 2.5 g
- Fat
- 7 g
- Saturated fat
- 1 g
- Carbohydrates
- 14 g
- Fiber
- 3 g
- Sugar
- 7 g
- Sodium
- 161 mg
Estimated from the ingredient list, per serving. Not a substitute for a label.