Cucumber & Avocado Salad

I'm not a fan of those standard green salads with lettuce, spinach, watercress, rocket and other raw leaves.  My friend Aiden sometimes buys a bag of washed salad and just eats it like that. Unseasoned, cold, bland leaves.  What kind of a snack is that? That's no way of getting your five-a-day.  I prefer cooked vegetables.  I love steamed green beans, sauteed spinach, baked broccoli, braised kale and that is how I get my greens in.   I don't like raw leafy salads.

I remember when I went on my raw challenge and I just ate stupid leaves for three days.  It was a bad experience, I ended up hating everyone and everything.

But this raw salad is brilliant.  Cucumbers and avocados are good raw.  They have exciting textures and flavors, and putting the two together, you get the richness of the avocado that breaks up in the salad and becomes part of the dressing coating the fresh, crunchy cucumbers.  Everything's mixed with just some lemon juice, lemon zest and olive oil.  See, isn't that so much more exciting than eating some raw spinach salad?

It's fresh, it's crunchy, it's creamy, it's zingy, it's a proper salad that will make both you and your doctors happy.

Serves 4 as a side
Ingredients
1 small avocado
2 medium cucumbers
1 large lemon, zest and juice
Extra virgin olive oil
a handful of basil, chopped

Method
Cut the avocado in half, remove the pit, slice the flesh, take out and cut into cubes.

Peel the cucumbers, slice in half lengthways and slice into 1cm half-moon shapes. 

Put the cucumber with the avocado and mix with plenty of olive oil, lemon juice, lemon zest and basil.  Make sure you really mix as you want to break up the avocado a bit so it becomes part of the dressing.