Halloween Salads! There’s just not enough of them, IMHO. So I’m adding this simple salad into the Halloween recipe mix. I actually made this last year for Castellon’s Kitchen, but it got lost in the crossover of my blogs so… I thought I’d give it a little more air time and post it here. This salad was inspired by the cool crisp cucumber salads served at Japanese restaurants and Sushi places. I usually order it along side my Ashley roll and it’s the best! In this version, I kicked up the simple soy dressing with some garlic chili sauce for heat and instead of slicing the cucumbers, I spiralized them to create this super festive salad with a whole lot of dramatic plating that’s perfect for All Hallows Eve! Enjoy!

Ssslithering Sssalad

Dramatic plating goes a long way for this sssimple sssalad of cool cucumbers in a ssspicy sssoy sssesame dressing.

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Course: Salad

Cuisine: Asian

Keyword: cucumbers, Halloween, Halloween Food, snakes

Servings:

Ingredients

2 large English cucumbers
3-4 small Persian cucumbers
Spicy Dressing (see below)
juniper berries, peppercorns or allspice berries (for snake eyes)
dried chile pepper (snake tongue)
black sesame seeds (garnish)

Spicy Dressing

2½ tbsp rice wine vinegar
1-2 tbsp garlic chili sauce (to taste)
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp toasted sesame oil
1 tbsp honey
1 tsp fresh ginger, finely grated

Instructions

Prepare Spicy dressing: Mix all ingredients together in a small bowl and set aside.
Spiralize cucumbers:
To get the best results use straight cucumbers. Select one of the cucumbers to be your snake head. If you have one that still has a bit of the vine attached, that will make a good head because the tongue is built in. The other large cucumber will create the main body of the snake, and the smaller Persian cucumbers will make up the tapered tail so try to select cucumbers that graduate down in size.
Head: On the non-vine end of the cucumber, thread a bamboo skewer through the center of the cucumber lengthwise leaving enough of the skewer exposed so you can pull it out later. I left about an inch and a half. This photo below shows a much longer section of the skewer as it was an in progress pic, but the amount of skewer exposed will depend on how big your cucumbers are to begin with.
Place your threaded cucumber down on the cutting board, and with your knife at about a 45 degree angle, slowly rotate the cucumber as you cut down to the skewer, creating a continuous spiral around the skewer that holds everything in place.
Adjust as you go. Your cuts will not be even all the way around due to the variation of the cucumbers and how centered your skewer is inside, but don't worry too much about it. Once the cuts are done, the variations of the spirals will hardly be noticeable.
Continue cutting the spirals until you are about 4 inches from the end of the cucumber(snakes head). You don't want to cut spirals all the way into his head. Carefully remove the bamboo skewer to release your snake coils. Repeat with the other large cucumber but, this time spiralized your cuts all the way down the length of the cucumber. Repeat with the smaller Persian cucumbers.
Snake eyes: Use the end of a skewer to poke eye holes in the cucumber and press juniper berries into the eye holes. If you can't find juniper berries, substitute with whole allspice berries or peppercorns.
Tongue: If the cucumber has a piece of the vine still attached, like in this photo, then just trim the tongue to desired length. Otherwise, cut a small slice of dried chile pepper and cut a notch in one end of it to create a forked tongue. Insert it into the cucumber (as pictured below).
Arrange snake sections on a serving platter. Line up end to end trimming the rounded ends to match up the graduating widths of the cucumbers until you get to the final tail piece.
Drizzle with spicy dressing, garnish with black sesame seeds. Slice and serve immediately. Enjoy!