Jodie's Kitchen - Restaurant, Catering, Cookery Teacher in Taipei, Taiwan

Recipes & Cookery Tips

Feta cheese with cucumber in olive oil and basil dressing

A recipe for people who don't know how to cook...

I invited an Italian chef to stay with me, while he was visiting Taipei. Duing the month of his staying, I first got to see how simple and tasty the Italian home style cooking is.

Very often I saw the chef, Alessandro, mix olive oil with cucumber and tomatoes, that would be his happy lunch with bread.

I followed the chef's home receipe. It looks simple and it is simple to make, but it does taste very refreshing. I found out the secret of the dish: the olive oil. A good quality extra-virgin olive oil upgrades a boring salad dish, it gives the salad a soul!

Italians tend to use mozarella in this kind of dish, I learn a few different ways of using feta cheese from the artistic Australian chef, Donna Hay, then I thougth it might be a good idea to add feta cheese in Alessandro's salad. And it works!

Ingredients

2 cucumbers, pared, cut into bite-size pieces
15 basil leaves, torn into small pieces
1 teaspoon of olive oil
Feta cheese cut into small cubes – as much as you like!
A little bit of salt

How to make it

1. Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl.
2. That's it, you can have lunch now!

Note: You can use mozarella cheese instead of feta cheese if you prefer.

©2004 Jodie's Kitchen