Chayote Salad #Recipe by Maya Corrigan

I first ate chayote in Mexico decades ago and liked both the texture and the mild taste. A few years later, chayotes showed up in supermarkets near me. Part of the squash family, they are also known as christophine or pipinola, as well as other names depending on the region. When ripe, a chayote looks like a light green pear with rough skin. It's crunchy when eaten raw and tastes like a cross between a cucumber and an apple. 

I adapted the recipe for chayote salad that I'm sharing today from a recipe in the New York Times. 

My version serves 6 as a side dish.

Ingredients

2 chayotes, about 3/4 to 1 pound each, halved vertically

1 heaping tsp imported mustard

1 1/2 Tbsp red wine vinegar

4 Tbsp peanut, vegetable or corn oil

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1 clove garlic, finely minced (approximately 1 tsp)

1/4 tsp dried hot-pepper flakes

3/4 cup thinly-sliced red onion

Optional:

2 cups thin-sliced, halved red ripe tomatoes

1/4 cup finely chopped fresh parsley

Directions

Peel the chayotes to remove the tough skin. Split each in half, as shown in the photo of the ingredients. Put them in a pan with water to cover and salt to taste. Don’t remove the seeds, which are edible.

Bring the water to boil and let the chayotes simmer until just tender when pierced with fork. Depending on their size, this can take 10-15 minutes.

While the chayotes are cooking, prepare the other ingredients. Mince the garlic and chop the onion. 

For the dressing, mix mustard, vinegar, and oil. Add salt and pepper to taste. Blend the mixture.

When the chayotes are tender, drain and run them briefly under cold water. Drain again.

Cut the halves lengthwise into quarter-inch-thick slices. Put them in a salad bowl, add the onion and garlic, and toss with the dressing. 

You can serve the salad at room temperature, but marinating and chilling it for a couple of hours or even days will give it a piquant flavor. We enjoyed the salad as a side dish three nights in a row.

READERS: Have you recently tried a new ingredient or dish?

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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mystery series. It features a young cafe manager and her young-at-heart grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Each book has five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes. Maya has taught college courses in writing, literature, and detective fiction. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Visit her website for book news, mystery history and trivia, and easy recipes. Sign up for her newsletter there. She gives away a free book to one subscriber each time she sends out a newsletter. Follow her on Facebook.

A PARFAIT CRIME: Five-Ingredient Mystery #9

Set in a quaint Chesapeake Bay town, the latest novel in Maya Corrigan’s Five-Ingredient Mysteries brings back café manager Val Deniston and her recipe columnist grandfather – a sleuthing duo that shares a house, a love of food and cooking, and a knack for catching killers.

At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in Jane’s freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?

After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at Granddad’s house to get to work—and enjoy his five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Granddad retrace the victim’s final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler.

Read an excerpt and see where to buy A Parfait Crime.  

Praise for A Parfait Crime

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