Recipe Review: Cucumber Sandwich

The next recipe I’m reviewing is a cucumber sandwich from eatingwell.com. Written by Amanda Stanfield, this recipe makes one serving and claims to only take a total of 10 minutes to make. 

Ingredients:

2 ounces cream cheese, room temperature

1 tablespoon Greek yogurt

1 tablespoon fresh chives

1 tablespoon fresh chopped dill

¼ teaspoon ground pepper

2 slices whole-wheat bread

⅓ thinly sliced English cucumber

To make this sandwich, start with the cream cheese mixture. Mix the cream cheese, yogurt, and seasonings together in a small bowl, then spread on one side of each slice of bread. Thinly slice your cucumber and place the slices on one piece of bread. Close the sandwich, and you’re finished!

To be completely honest, I made several tweaks to this recipe. I used white bread instead of whole-wheat, dried dill and pepper to taste, and completely omitted the chives. The point of this blog is to reduce waste and make these recipes, even the simplest ones, more accessible. Making these changes was what did that for me. 

Most of these tweaks didn’t work out in my favor. I definitely don’t recommend using white bread. It was immediately soggy and it didn’t have enough structure to withstand the thick cream cheese and yogurt spread. Another note about the spread is that my cream cheese was too cold. It didn’t change the flavor, but combining the mixture was more difficult than it probably would have been had I let the cream cheese get to room temperature. 

 I don’t think using dried dill made any difference compared to fresh dill. I love seasoning to taste, I just didn’t season enough. Even if I had seasoned the mixture properly, the sandwich was incredibly bland, which I think using a different bread would have partly remedied. 

The cucumbers added a really interesting texture that the flat, slightly soggy sandwich really needed. The original recipe recommended using a mandolin, but I think the slices would have been unpleasantly thin. I used one layer of hand sliced cucumbers, and I definitely should have added another layer. 

Overall, I really like this recipe. I think what makes committing to vegetarianism or even just reducing meat consumption in general so difficult is that it simply just takes more time and work than readily available meat-based options. I found this recipe to be really approachable and it didn’t really take me any longer to make than a meat-based sandwich. It was also super simple ingredient wise and very cheap. All of the ingredients are things I usually keep in my fridge anyways, so I’m not buying more things that will get half used and thrown away. I will definitely be making this recipe again.