Thai Cucumber Salad with Dried Shrimp Crisps

Thai Cucumber Salad with Dried Shrimp Crisps

I absolutely love anything with cucumbers.  Cucumbers bring a fresh, cool, clean feeling to almost any dish.  In fact I even love cucumber body wash, cucumber Gatorade, cucumber infusion water, everything cucumber.  This salad is a quick and easy way to get your fresh cucumber fix with minimal ingredients and time requirements.  It also adds the adventure of zesty Southeast Asian ingredients to keep life interesting.

There are a lot of ways you could do this recipe.  If you google Thai cucumber salad you will find many variations of the same thing.  I think mine is unique for the ingredients I pulled out of my wife's stash to replace the typical ingredients you will find.  You can swap the shrimp crisps for peanuts or add peanuts if you want and you can simply use salt rather than the salt substitute I used.  You could also swap parsley for the cilantro for a similar but different flavor.

Special ingredients you will need

• Shrimp Crisps- You can most likely find these dried shrimp at the closest Asian market.  I tried finding them on Amazon.com to no avail.  They are a Vietnamese product so you're best bet is the local Vietnamese market.  They have a bit of a fishy odor when you open the jar but the cucumber combines well with it.  It ends up making a wonderful blend of flavors and the crunch adds a nice aspect to the experience.
  

  Shrimp Crisps

• Spike salt substitute - When Mod last went to Whole Foods I asked her to grab some salt substitute.  This is what she got but there are better versions which I recommend for this recipe to decrease the sodium content.  You can pick some of this up from their website if nothing else.  I promise, they are not paying me to promote their product.  It's just what we found and it works great in this recipe.
  

  Spike Salt Substitute

The other ingredients are pretty straight forward and easy to come by.

Ingredients:

Thai Cucumber Salad Ingredients

• 3 medium cucumbers or about 2 pounds cut into halves and quarters
  

  3 medium cucumbers

• ¼ small onion sliced into small pieces
• ½ tablespoon of salt substitute

Dressing

• 2 tbsp. stevia
• 4 tbsp. water
• 8 tbsp. Thai sweet chili sauce
• 2 tbsp. vinegar

Garnish

• Optional- peanuts
• Optional- dried shrimp crisps
• 1 bundle cilantro cut into small pieces for garnish

Instructions:

1. After you have sliced the cucumber place it in a large salad bowl and toss with the salt substitute.  then place in the refrigerator for 15 minutes.
2. Heat the stevia, water, Thai chili sauce and vinegar in a sauce pan for several minutes stirring occasionally.  After mixing let cool.
3.  Toss the ingredients with the dressing
4. Serve with the garnish on the side if you are entertaining non-Asians as the shrimp may be off putting

Inspiration for this recipe came from rasamalaysia.com http://pin.it/4eH-3Qb.

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