Quick Cucumber, Tomato, Onion, and Radish Salad

Quick Cucumber, Tomato, Onion, and Radish Salad

It’s that time of year! No, not all the fresh summer produce salad recipes, but my quickie recipes for when we are headed to the coast again to go fishing and/or crabbing. Once again, we’ll be on another extended weekend trip so am posting this one early instead of Saturday.

We didn’t catch any halibut last trip, it was super-windy with 6-to-8-foot horrible wind waves and our bait wouldn’t stay on the bottom with all the rocking and rolling. Then I got seasick as hell, WAHHH! Hubby will attempt again this weekend, while I’ll stay behind and fish the calm river for salmon.

I was wanting to make a Panzanella salad out of what produce I had on hand, but last minute hubby couldn’t help with the prep of this and ran out of time to make the bread cubes since I didn’t have any stale bread on hand. So this is what I came up with. Lively, fresh, and delicious!

The cucumber came from a friend’s garden, the tomatoes from our own, and the radishes from the farmer’s market. The rest came from the store (organic as possible).

And this would also make a great side dish for a Labor Day BBQ or picnic! This no-mayo recipe makes it a snap to store and serve.

Quick Cucumber, Tomato, Onion, and Radish Salad

1 English cucumber, sliced and quartered (about 2 cups, can be more or less)
1 cup fresh diced tomatoes
1/2 cup diced sweet onion
1/2 cup diced radishes
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons fresh-squeezed lemon juice
1 teaspoon rice vinegar, or plain white
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
Salt and ground black pepper, to taste

Prep all the ingredients, toss in a bowl and stir to combine. Refrigerate one hour or more. Serve with a slotted spoon. See? Quick and easy. Yumm!

Download and Print this Yummy Recipe!

 

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Good Ol’ Shrimp Boil Potato Salad

Good Ol’ Shrimp Boil Potato Salad ~ We decimated more than half this meal before I remembered to take a photo!!!

This is a tasty, quick and easy meal to prepare, especially when you are about to head out of town for 5 days for another fishing trip to the coast. This time, Halibut Fishing! Many of you might remember my shark adventure from couple of years ago when we tried to catch halibut, and on the same trip my hubby caught a manta ray! Hopefully we’ll get the right species this time around.

Kathryn the Shark Woman

I saw this recipe in my most recent issue of Southern Living magazine, and with lots of shrimp in the freezer, it called my name. This takes very little time to prepare, especially if you use my “secret” Bundt-pan corn trick, shown below from another post. (I do actually stick a corn-cob holder in the top to stabilize the corn when cutting, but I had no helper to take a photo when I shot this. The foibles of food photography!)

Cutting the Corn off the Cob

I couldn’t find Creole mustard at the store that it called for (well, I do live in Oregon) but a quick google search came up with an easy substitute with items I had on hand.

I hope you enjoy this as much as me and my husband did, eating al fresco out on our back deck in glorious sunny weather. This tastes great warm or cold, I had leftovers the next day cold and just WOW! The flavors really intensified. This would be a great potluck or picnic meal, no mayo!

Good Ol’ Shrimp Boil Potato Salad
Adapted from Southern Living

1/4 pound smoked sausage, cut into thin slices
1 1.5-ounce package boil-in-bag shrimp-and-crab boil (I used McCormick’s)
1/2 pound baby red potatoes
1 ear fresh sweet corn, husks removed
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup olive oil
1/8 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
1 1/2 tablespoons course-ground Dijon mustard
1/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Several dashes of Tabasco
2 green onions, sliced
1 garlic clove, minced
A few shakes of paprika
1/2 teaspoon horseradish sauce
1 pound peeled and deveined shrimp

Brown the sausage over high heat in a skillet for just a few minutes, remove and set aside. Add the crab boil packet, potatoes, and corn cob with enough water to cover an inch over the veggies over high heat.

Once boiling, cook for about 10 more minutes until potatoes are softened.

Meanwhile, whisk together the rest of the ingredients except the shrimp in a bowl.

Once potatoes are done, add the shrimp and cooked sausage, turn off heat, then cover for 5 minutes.

After 5 minutes, drain and pour the food into a large serving bowl. Remove the corn and cut the kernels off the cob and add the kernels to the bowl. (I halved the potatoes after they were done but failed to add that to the PDF version recipe.) Pour the seasoned lemon/oil mixture over it, and stir to combine well. Serve immediately, or cover and refrigerate up to 24 hours. YUMMMM!

I won’t have a post up again for about a week and a half, don’t miss me too much, lol. 😀

Download and Print this Yummy Recipe!

 

 

 

 

Summer Summer Summertime Fun! (and a Seafood/BBQ Fest!)

My friend caught this snap of me casting a Kwik-Fish for salmon.

Hoo Boy! Where do you start when you had a 9-day camping vacation, get thrown back into work full-time, then have so many blogs to read and laundry and housework to do? I’m slowly catching up on my social networking. I don’t have much for a recipe, per se, rather than a compilation of photos and a few tidbits of what we ate and/or caught to eat at the river on the coast. We had so much fun that I can’t even describe it! I’ll let the photos help tell the story. Enjoy!

Taco Fixin’s ~ First things first! We had an easy meal of tacos our first full day camping.

My husband flipped the other half of our dock over that’s been sitting around upside-down for six years and extended our patio. Our dock is now a deck! (The other half is still serving as a dock in the river.) Here he is screwing in the last of the railings. It made our entertaining space so much bigger!

Finishing the Deck

It made a great place to store firewood for the weekend.

Firewood Storage Place

Between us and our neighbor friends who also traveled from our home town, we caught over 50 crawdads off our docks. It made for a grand feast along with ribs, oysters, and clams that were bought at the store!

Crawdads Caught Off Our Docks

Nom nom! Here we are enjoying fresh barbecued oysters!

Enjoying and Spicing up Fresh BBQ’d Oysters!

And these were just the appetizers!

Seafood Appetizers

Here we are enjoying the feast on our new deck!

Feast on the Deck

Here my husband is pointing out the final details of how to smoke some ribs for one of our meals.

Smoking Ribs with Some Stubb’s BBQ Sauce ~ Oh Yeah!

Of course we had to bring our lovable fur-kids with us to enjoy the life on the river!

Bohdi and Hannah Banana

Rocky and Friend

The evening of 4th of July we had cheese-stuffed cheeseburgers and hot dogs.  You have to have some burgers and dogs on 4th of July! Lip-smacking good!

Cheeseburger Fixin’s

Cheese-Stuffed Cheeseburger

Here is my friend “boasting” how he slayed the Dungeness Crab we caught out in the Siletz Bay for our final dinner. That’s some good eating!

Slaying the Dungeness Crab

I had to make a much-needed pit-stop during our 5-hour crabbing trip on the bay. It was a tad windy out there but we had a grand time!

On the Siletz Bay ~ Our boat needs a new coat of paint, ya’ think?

Black Cormorant and Seagull ~ Common Seabirds Seen on the Bay

Last, one of my friends helped my husband get my owl box permanently installed in a tree on our property. I’ll have to put up a “for rent” sign to get a barn owl family to move in and rid the property of the pesky moles and mice.

Barn Owl Box in Permanent Position

Cheers to great friends, cheap beer, seafood fests and barbecues, and a good old-fashioned 4th of July! 😀

Cheers!