Pinteresting Summer

Challenge 31- Edible Cucumber Bowls and Avocado Chicken Salad

Normally when I'm pinning food items, I tend to lean more towards the sweet and delicious and less towards the healthy and sensible. When I saw the pin where you cut cucumbers into thick slices and use a melon baller to scoop out the middle and use it as an edible serving dish I knew I had to give it a try, but what to put in this edible dishware. Fortunately, I also had pinned a recipe for a low mayo chicken salad that used avocado so I figured I could kill two pins with one recipe.

Now I will admit I made a few mistakes right from the beginning:

Mistake 1- I forgot to peel the skins before I started cutting (this was a total brain fart on my part, but when I thought about doing it later I couldn't find my vegetable peeler so I wouldn't have been able to do it anyway so I don't feel as bad about this one.)

Mistake 2- I bought cucumbers that were WAY to big and wide. This picture from the pin had these cute little cucumbers and for some reason when I bought these at Albertson's I went for the gigantic sized ones. This made it difficult for a few reasons which I'll get to in a bit.

Here are my nicely (and thickly) sliced cucumbers with their skins still on. You have to cut them thick so you have enough width to scoop out with the melon baller. This is why having smaller cucumbers is better because these where crazy big slices of cucumber which would be a lot for somebody to try and eat.

You have to be very careful when scooping out the middle. You want to leave enough of a dip to put a filling in but if you scoop too much this will happen:

I had to sacrifice a few cucumber slices do to my overzealous scooping. It wasn't a difficult process and not too time consuming, you just have to be careful when your doing it or you'll end up with cucumber donuts instead of bowls.

Now the recipe for the chicken salad I pinned wasn't so much a recipe as a ingredient list. The blogger basically explained that she used those ingredients but wasn't sure in what amounts and it was all by taste. Well if another blogger can do it so can I.

My chicken salad recipe was:
1 large can of Target brand chicken breast
1 pouch of 100 Calorie Wholy Guacamole
1 short squirt of Lite Miracle Whip
1 teaspoon(ish) of sweet relish
3 short squirts of lime juice

I liked this chicken salad recipe and it was different from what I normally make but these cups would be great with any chicken salad recipe you come up with. After I spooned out the chicken salad I had a few cucumbers left so I tried one filled with red pepper hummus and one with cottage cheese. The cucumbers held the filling well and it tasted great.

These are great as an appetizer or lunch, and way lower calorie than putting the fillings on crackers or bread. They would also be awesome for someone going low carb. You definitely could just slap the filling on the top of a cucumber slice but I do believe scooping out the middle kept the filling from falling off and gave you more room to be generous with your filling. I will make these again with other fillings, making sure I fix both of the egregious mistakes.