Chicken Queso, Braised Red Cabbage & Cucumber Salad

I made the cucumber salad first because I wanted the dill weed to have plenty of time to permeate all of the yogurt and impart its springlike flavor to the entire salad. This is a super simple salad. Slice the cucumbers a thinly as possible. Spread the slices out in a pie plate and salt it. This will get some of the water out of the cucumber so the salad does not get soggy and watery. Transfer to a bowl, add the sliced onion, yogurt and dill. Cover and chill in the fridge for a few hours before serving.

• 1 cucumber sliced thin
• salt
• 3 TBSP thinly sliced onion
• 1/2 cup plain yogurt
• 1 TBSP dill weed

The Braised Cabbage Slaw is another make-ahead salad that just tastes better and better. Shred the cabbage thinly. Slice up about 1/3 of an onion. Dice one apple and you’re ready to start cooking.  Put olive oil in a skillet and add onions and soften them. Add the cabbage and apples. Let them start to cook and in a bowl, add the apple cider vinegar, sugar, mustard and caraway seed. Mix together. Toss on the cabbage and cover. Cook for about 5 minutes until just tender, but still with some crisp. Enough liquid will come out of the cabbage to give you all the braising liquid you need. I know it will seem that you cannot possibly dress all the cabbage with so little dressing, but cabbage is so rich with liquid that you want to be light with the dressing and let the cabbage juices carry your dressing. The apricot I quartered on the side really loved the caraway vinegar dressing that was left on the plate after I ate the slaw.

• 1/3 head of red cabbage, shredded thinly
• 1/3 of an onion.
• 1 apple
• 1 TBSP of olive oil
• 2 TBSP apple cider vinegar
• 2 tsp sugar (brown sugar if you have it)
• 2 tsp mustard
• 2 tsp caraway seed

At supper time, I made a chicken queso using chicken reserved from the chicken I stewed for soup. I put some green salsa in a saute pan and used it instead of oil or water to braise the chicken. When the chicken was nearly hot through, I added the cheese. On a griddle I was toasting the tortilla. I put the tortilla on the plate, added the chicken queso and tossed in a few sprigs of cilantro.

• 4 oz stewed chicken
• 1.5 ounces of cheddar and pepper jack cheese. (3/4 ounce of each)
• 2 TBSP green salsa.
• Cilantro

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