Crab Stick Salad with Corn, Egg and Cucumber

Step-by-step recipe

1. Before buying a pack of crab sticks, it's worth reading the label. Starch and “healthy” additives will always be there, but the presence and amount of surimi can vary greatly. Reading reviews of the product doesn't hurt either. Whether to add rice to the salad is up to you. For two servings of salad, one fresh cucumber, a couple of eggs, a little dill, a green onion stalk and a small can of canned corn are enough, just as for a Chinese cabbage salad.
   
2. Preparing the ingredients comes down to boiling the rice and the eggs. Boil the eggs for 8-10 mins, cool them under running water and peel right away. It's best to take a non-sticky rice variety – parboiled rice is ideal. You can boil it in plenty of water, then drain and cool the rice to room temperature.
3. Put the cooled boiled rice in a deep bowl that's convenient for mixing the ingredients. Drain the liquid from the small can of sweet corn and add the kernels to the rice. Dice the hard-boiled, peeled eggs. Cut the cucumber not too coarsely. If you like, you can peel the cucumber or leave it as is. I suggest setting aside half of one egg yolk and a thin slice of cucumber to decorate the dish when serving.
   
5. Carefully open the pack of crab sticks and free all the sticks from their individual wrappers. Cut the sticks into cubes or slices – whichever you like. The size of the pieces should be slightly larger than the corn kernels. You can set one stick aside to decorate the salad. Finely chop the green onion stalk. Pick all the “feathery” sprigs off the dill and throw away the tough stems. Chop the dill fairly finely.
   
6. Add the dill, green onion and chopped sticks to the bowl with the rice. Season with a pinch of salt and black pepper. Gently mix the salad so that all the ingredients are evenly distributed. Add 2-3 tbsp of mayonnaise to the salad mixture. Ideally, if you can, use homemade mayonnaise, which is really not hard to make. Still, good store-bought mayonnaise is no longer a rarity. One important point – you need only a little mayonnaise, otherwise the crab salad will end up “swimming”.
   
7. How to decorate crab salad
8. Mix everything once more to spread the dressing. The crab stick salad with corn is ready. This is one of the few salads I wouldn't serve in a salad bowl. On a large flat plate, lay several washed and dried lettuce leaves. Set a large-diameter pastry ring or any cylindrical mold on the leaves. Spoon the salad into the mold all the way to the top, pressing it down slightly. Remove the mold – the salad will stay in the shape of a cylinder. Decorate the dish with a sprig of dill and grate egg yolk over it. Arrange cucumber cut into matchsticks and a crab stick alongside.
   
9. Serve the salad at room temperature. If you like, you can add more pepper. Besides the ingredients suggested here, you can add a diced avocado, a tart apple, and even real crab meat – that gives you a crab salad in the true sense. Olives and capers are often added to the plate for decoration.