Carla's Crunchy Feta Saladhy

No has anyone seen Polly? No Polly's gone. Polly gone? Polly gone. Hello all you ice queens. This is Carla and I'm back in my kitchen today with another banger from That Sounds So Good. I am going to be making crunchy juicy feta salad. This is the crunchiest, juiciest salad you're gonna have this summer. I've got this dried herb and dried chili vinaigrette that takes like two seconds to make. We've got crunchy veggies and I have a little trick to make them extra crunchy, extra delicious, perfectly seasoned. And then on top of it we have salad's favorite cheese, feta. She's luscious. She's creamy. She's salty. She's crumbly. She's widely available. And I just want to finish by saying no limp veggies. A bowl of ice. So this is a great trick to make crunchy vegetables even crunchier and to make sad vegetables crunchy again. It's a reviver and it's also a natural enhancer. You could do this outdoors. Get that cold cold hose. Get a big bowl of ice. Maybe just scoop it from the cocktail ice before you dump it over the beers. And then we're gonna salt this generously. It's not measured. It's just a salty ice bath. Kind of in the same way that cooking pasta in salted water makes the noodles seasoned, soaking raw vegetables in salty cold water is also going to season them. So they're getting seasoned. They're getting infused with cold water again. They're getting crisped up and super crunchy. So that's the crunchy secret right there. I have fennel. I have beautiful radishes. And I have some cukes. Like all of my recipes, there's infinite amounts of spinach. So if you're not a fennel person, but you're a celery person, go for it. Use a carrot. If you like radishes, get into the whole radish family. These are the Easter egg and the French breakfasts. But there's the watermelons. There's black radish. There's daikon. I hope by now you have also watched Pesto Ratio. Save your fennel fronds because they can become a pesto. Save your radish greens. They can become a pesto. And the stalks of the fennel, I always put into stalk. Stalk, stalk. So if you don't have a mandolin, you're just gonna slice thinly. If you do have a mandolin, you're gonna rejoice in the speed and ease of which you can slice a bulb of fennel. We have beautiful sliced fennel, crisping, abundantly thriving. Cute little radishes. I'm gonna do these on the mandolin. Also, I'm gonna leave a little bit of stem as like a handle. So long guys, I feel like want to go long, right? That's pretty. And then these guys want to go round because they're round. I'm over here potentially losing fingers to the mandolin. And all I ask is for a like, a subscribe. Maybe, maybe, maybe you're gonna turn the bell on. And maybe if you love ice as much as we do, you could just throw that little ice emoji down below because how often do you get to use it really? It's one of my faves. Another benefit of my super ice salty soaker is that radishes are in the mustard family with the other brassicas. So they have to have that like spicy bite. Soaking them in the cold water is gonna deflame them. Also works for your raw onion. Just for funsies, I'm gonna cut these different than these kinds of slices. And we're gonna do our old friend, the roll cut. So you roll, you take a little off, you roll and you roll. So then they're kind of like polygons, five sided polygon, cucumber polygon. There are so many cool cucumbers. There's lemon cucumbers, and there's the twisty cucumbers. So go check them out and put them in this salad. This is a super, super simple lemony, dried chili, dried herb vinaigrette. I'm gonna start with fresh lemon. Lime juice would be really, really nice with everything else in this. So if you don't have a lemon, use a lime or just go up on the vinegar amount. And then I've got olive oil, some red wine vinegar. This is a broken vinaigrette. There's no like binder that's more of like a free flowing situation. There are very few dried herbs that I will like 100% get behind. And two of them are being used today. Dried oregano and dried mint. Dried mint can be a little hard to find, but you could just buy mint tea, cut open the tea bag and use that. That is dried mint. And this dried chili that I'm using is called Erfo Biber. It's a Turkish chili. It's just really tasty, not too spicy, really chocolatey. You can use Aleppo pepper, which is much easier to find. You could use a pinch of hot paprika. You could use some regular crushed red chili flake, but this is nice. It looks cool. It's really pretty. So I'm going to season the vinaigrette with S&P. Making it a little bit ahead is kind of a good call. It's going to help draw out the flavor of the herbs. And I'm just going to test it also with a dusted off, very crunchy radish. Tasty and delicious. So because the vegetables have been soaked, obviously, they're going to be quite waterlogged. You don't want to put wet or waterlogged vegetables into your salad because obviously they will just water out and dilute the beautiful dressing we just made. So you could drain these first. I'm just not going into the sink because we don't need you to see that right now. I'm going to do this like kind of quickly and efficiently because we have beautiful cold veggies and we want them to stay cold. So I'm just pressing gently to get that water off. Make a little donut. These are going to sit over here. I'm going to cut some tomatoes. You could use any color. You could also get into a beefsteak and just chop it up. But this is where more of that juicy texture is going to come from because those guys are more of our crunchy, snappy texture. And this is more of our sexy, juicy texture. Food stylist trick. When halving your tomatoes, food stylists consider this pull to pull exceptionally ugly, right? Nobody wants to see this hard white thing and it's not pretty. Alternately, you're going to cut your tomato on just a little bit of an angle. And it's true. It's prettier. Come on. Beautiful tomatoes. So crunchy veg, dress it up. So look how pretty they look as they are blotted. They get a little bendy and a little curly. See a radish. They have a little curly curve to them. That's from the soaking in the water. Human salad spinner is a good trick for when you're staying at a house that doesn't have a salad spinner and somebody has to be the salad spinner. The key thing is make sure your bundle is secure. But then what happens is you just spray water in just this perfect line. That's how to be a human salad spinner. Cross with my hands just to get the tomatoes. But it already looks so beautiful and so refreshing. I'm going to cut my feta slabs. This looks like a dainty amount of feta. So if you want to add more, like I get it, and I would just want so much feta on mine as well. And I've given you permission to add as much feta as you would like. But also a feta slab and the word slab is very appealing to me. To finish it off, a couple tablespoons of sesame seeds. If you wanted to, any kind of little toasted nut or seed would be nice in here. This is just for that last layer of texture. And I'm just going to whisk this to recombine it. Yeah, it changed while it was sitting. I taste the oregano and the mint so much more. I'm going to add a little bit of salt because I felt like the dressing needed it. I'm going to pepper. I think this would be incredible with any kind of grilled lamb. I think it'd be great with steak. I think it would be really beautiful with seafood. It looks so pretty. In the winter, thinly sliced cauliflower given the crunchy, juicy ice bath treatment would be so fantastic. Personal feta slab for me. I'm just going to finish it off with a little ses, a little more erfa, maybe a little extra drizzle drazzle because why not? Remember your salted ice bath trick is going to make any crunchy veggie exceptional. Now you know the trick and also now you know how to be a human salad spinner. So it's a full two for one today. Every bite should actually have a bite of feta. This is a salad equivalent of a cold plunge. It's a salad equivalent of a crisp mountain breeze. It's a salad equivalent of like a cold running brook bouncing off shiny rocks. Enjoy it, crunch it, juice it, and absolutely slab it.