FAST & Fresh Watermelon Feta Salad | The Perfect Summer Salad!

Nothing says summer like watermelon. So let me show you this amazing and refreshing watermelon salad. This salad is a mix of juicy watermelon, ripe tomatoes or right from my garden, crisp cucumbers, fresh mint, red onion and creamy feta cheese on top. And we got a simple lime vinaigrette. This salad is super easy to make. It's bursting with the vibrant flavors of summer for the full ingredient. Let's check the description box below. But enough talking. Let's get cooking. Let me show you how I like to cut the watermelon for this recipe. The watermelon usually has a flat spot on the bottom where it was sitting on the patch. Put it right on there. That's going to be its flattest spot. Now, from here, I'm going to take my nice, sharp chef's knife and you got to make sure that the knife is big enough. I'm going to take the knife and push it right through the middle. Once I get all the way down that, I don't have much knife left. I'm going to cleaver down towards the cutting board until I get to the cutting board. Then I'm going to turn the watermelon the other way. So I'm going to take the knife and I'll stick it back in the same spot. And I'll cleaver down towards the cutting board. And now perfectly sliced watermelon in half. And now we can break it down into slices. We're only going to need half the watermelon for this recipe. So now I'm going to take the watermelon and I'm going to put it cut side down. And now here I'm going to cut off slices through the watermelon, leaving about because this side's got a little bit of a rind on it. So I'll probably go about two inches in for that first slice. And now I'm going to cut each one about an inch thick. And I'm trying to be as uniform as possible. Cutting these about an inch thick. I push the knife through. I find the front of the cutting board. I pull push through. I find the front of the cutting board and I pull. So now we have nice slices of the watermelon that are about an inch thick. We're trying to get the watermelon to the size that when you bite it, it's a good bite, but it's not too big. And if we cut the watermelon too small, all the juice runs out of it. So on the end pieces, I'll just take my knife and I'll try to follow the rind line as best as I can all the way around. This is the only one that's going to be a little odd shaped. But if I can get this all the way around and underneath and pop that right out, I'll take the watermelon and I'm pulling my knife through the watermelon and I'm cutting it into by probably like inch by inch squares. We'll do the same for the other end piece and then we'll do all the slices. So I'll go around trying to get as close to the rind line as possible. I'm going to follow that line all the way around my knife tip pointing in. Once I get all the way back around to where I started, we should be able to pop that right out. Now, once we get to these slices, I'm going to take my knife and I'm going to find the rind line and then short little strokes pushing all the way through, just trying to stay really tight to that rind line. And then we'll take that meat right off about an inch thick. Turn it sideways and same thing about an inch. So now this is probably enough watermelon for the salad that we're going to make. So the rest of us, I'm just going to cut up and keep in the fridge for little snacks throughout the day. I absolutely love watermelon. And, you know, there's only a short time of the year where it's actually good. You got to take advantage of it. And there's nothing better than reaching in the fridge and just grabbing some cold watermelon. We just eat it with a fork right in front of the fridge. And you can see that I'm trying to make a probably like an inch by inch cube. And that is the perfect size of watermelon. You can just pop right in your mouth and it's not going to feel too big, but it's big enough that it's got some juice in there. Because again, when you cut them too small, you lose all the juice. Watermelon now is so good. And now to store the other half of the watermelon, just going to take a piece of saran wrap and just put it right over the top. Sometimes I don't even have to put a rubber band on it. I can just pull it just like nice and taut over the edge and just the cling will will stick to it. And that is just enough to keep this thing fresh in the fridge until we run out of this watermelon. And then this goes into the fridge to get our eating watermelon. So next up for this salad is going to be some of these Persian cucumbers. And I'm just going to give them a light peel where I remove some of the peel, but not all of it. And I've already washed these. So if you haven't already, check out my fruit and vegetable washing video that shows how I clean my fruits and vegetables, because these things are covered with so much stuff. But the peel is good. So if you can get most of the gunk off of that pesticides, the ripening agents, the shiny stuff, then you can eat it. And it's actually really good. The only ones that you can really trust are the ones that were grown in your own garden if you didn't put anything on them. And cucumbers, just like the watermelon, don't chop down on them. I like to pull. So I'll cut the little ends off and then I'll line them up three at a time and cut slices that are probably, I don't know, maybe that's a quarter inch thick, maybe a little bit more than an eighth of an inch. Now, probably a quarter inch, quarter inch slices. And cucumbers are one of those things that slice really easy. So you can just do them a couple at a time. If they get in the way, you just push them over. Once you get down to the end, you want to get the last ones. Those I'll maybe do individually. Remember, no, no hero cuts cooking. The goal of cooking is to start and end with all your fingers intact. Now, this is probably enough cucumbers. We want the watermelon to be the star of the salad. Everything else is just backup. Next up, we're going to thinly slice some red onion. Now for this, you're going to want to cut them really thin. You know, I hate on salads when onions are cut very thickly. Just shows that they were rushing in the kitchen. They just wanted to get it on a plate. So I'm going to take my time to get really thinly sliced red onions. We don't need very many. I think about a quarter of that onion. That'll probably be enough. Actually, I take that back. I'm going to put the whole the whole half in. And when you get down to the end, you can get the last ones a little thinner if you flip the onion around the other way. And then you can get two slices off this one one. And then this one is really going to test if the knife is sharp. And everything was good. You can use a lot of different kinds of fresh herbs, but the one I really love with this salad is the mint. Mint goes so well with the watermelon and the feta. And it's just a wonderful, wonderful herb that we don't get to use a lot in the kitchen, but it is so good. Even the smell of this is fantastic. So I'll take a couple of leaves and I'll pull them off the stem. The bottom leaves, I'll just pull off by pulling. And then these top leaves, I just like to pinch off right there. And it's all leaf, no stem. So now to cut the mint. So I'll just keep them all pinched together. Well, I'll just grab the end of each one of the stems, even though the stem is pretty thin there. I'll push this all together. I don't have to roll them because they're basically already rolled. And now I'll just cut slices all the way through while I work my fingers backwards and I get all the way down to the end. I'll throw the little stem out that I was holding. And now we have nice, thinly sliced mint. When I do the individual leaves, I'll do them just like basil. I'll stack as many as I can right on top of each other. Once they're stacked up, I'll roll this one nice and fat. And then we'll slice this all the way through and working my fingers back as I slice through. So what would a summer salad be without some tomatoes? So here I got these amazing sun gold tomatoes. I grew these right in my garden, so I don't even have to wash them other than to get the dirt out because these things are so good. And I love the sun golds, because if you look at them, they are very uniform in size, even though I grew them myself. Sometimes when you grow the little tomatoes, you get some small ones, you get some big ones. But these are super uniform in shape and they're absolutely delicious. They're the perfect tomato to go inside the salad, not only because they're small, but tomatoes are generally red. But the watermelon is also red. This yellow orange color is a such a good color contrast for this amazing salad, because not only is this salad delicious, it's actually visually beautiful, the amount of colors that are in it. So we're going to slice these one at a time and just cut them right in half. I guess maybe with these, I could do the lid slicing technique, but I just like taking my time because also when you do the lid slicing technique, you don't know where you're going to go through the tomato. I like to go through the tomato right on the top and split where the stem came out right in half. So the tomato looks like this. If I cut the tomato this way, it doesn't quite look the same. One side is a little hard. One side is mushy. It's very ununiform here when we cut the tomato this way. We know that what you got on one side, you got on the other. And does that really make a difference? I don't know. It's just how I like to do things. So now that we got everything in the bowl, I'm just going to give this just a nice mix to get everything all mixed up. So the tomatoes, the onions, the cucumbers, the watermelon. We're going to give this just a nice, thorough mix until we get everything nice and uniform. Once this is all mixed up, I'm going to take this and I'm going to put this inside the fridge so everything can get a little cold altogether. While this is in the fridge, let's make our very simple but super delicious vinaigrette for the salad. So now for this vinaigrette, I'm going to juice three limes up. You can use a lemon, but I think lime and the mint and the watermelon make a fantastic combo all together. And I'm cutting these one at a time because I never know how many limes I need. Sometimes limes have a little juice. Sometimes they got a lot. These are rather juicy. So maybe I'm only going to use two. Yeah, I already had it out. Might as well use it. Now to that, we're going to add a little balsamic vinegar, some extra virgin olive oil, a little pepper and some salt. And here we don't even have to mix it because we're going to put it inside the squeeze bottle and in the bottom of this squeeze bottle is some of this same vinaigrette that I've already made. We just need a little bit more. I only have one of these squeeze bottles handy, so we're going to have to reuse the same one. And this is probably thin enough that I can just pour this right in. I don't need to get the funnel. All right, that worked out. We're not going to add an emulsifier. We'll just give it a little bit of a shake in between applications of this. And now I'll just put my finger right over the hole and I'll give this a shake. We don't have to stir it, shake it enough. And now you get this nice vinaigrette to put on top of the salad. So now let's stop talking about the salad. Let's make one. So now for the base of our salad, we're going to put down some arugula on the bottom of the bowl. And if arugula is not your thing, you could use a baby spinach. You could use spring mix, but definitely something a little lighter and not so crunchy. Now let's take a couple of big scoops of our watermelon and tomato cucumber salad. We're going to put that right in the middle. So one of the reasons I wait to dress the salad is this has a salt in it and the cucumbers got so much moisture. And when you put salt on top of cucumber, the water starts coming out of it really fast. So we don't want a lot of time with the vinaigrette touching the watermelon. So what we're going to do is we'll just give it a nice little shake right here. And then once it's already in the bowl, then we'll give it a little squirt of our delicious lime dressing right over the top. Last but not least, we're going to cut off a little hunk of feta cheese. So now we'll take that hunk of cheese and crumble it up right on top right before we eat it. And when you're crumbling feta, it doesn't all have to be small. It can be small. It can be big little combinations of. But that's what really makes it. And that salad is done and good to go. How delicious and amazing does the salad look? But this salad is so pretty. There's so many colors in it. But let's eat it and see what it tastes like. So we'll try to get a little bit of everything on one bite. A cucumber and get a tomato in there. Get a nice chunk of feta cheese. Some of the onions, a little bit of the arugula. This is going to be an epic bite. If there was any salad that tasted like summer, this is it. It's so fresh. It's sweet. It's savory. The watermelon, the tomatoes, the cucumber, they're all bursting with like crispiness and freshness. The mint really rounds it out altogether. This salad is delicious and it's summer in a bowl. And even though we didn't toss it, we just squirted on the vinaigrette right before everything is very well coated. This is a wonderful, fresh, healthy, delicious and easy salad. While I'm finishing the rest of this salad, check out my video where I share five tips on how to make an amazing Caesar salad at home. I'll see you there. Thanks.