The year of the cuke
This is the year of the cuke. Last year was the year of the zuke, and the year before that was the year of the tomato. But this year, we are inundated with cucumbers.
The gardener in the family thinks this can be attributed to all the rain we had in June, followed by the hot weather of July. Cucumbers are really nothing more than water balloons in green wrappers, so it’s no surprise that this would be the year we have them by the dozens. Every morning we pick what’s ripened over night, load them into the car and set out to hand them off. Yesterday I met a friend for breakfast and took three to give her. I thought about giving her five times that many, but there comes a point where a person is just being obnoxious with her home-grown vegetables.
In her smart, readable book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”, Barbara Kingsolver tells of the year her family ate only locally, rejecting food that had been trucked in from other places in favor of the food they or their neighbors grew or raised themselves. That year turned out to be a good one for zucchini in her Virginia community. She said that in most towns, people lock their doors at night to keep others from stealing from them. In her town, people locked their doors to keep neighbors from sneaking in at night to put zucchini on their kitchen counters.
That might be an option for us at this point. When the cucumbers first started coming in, we were all giddy about it. Sliced cucumber salad with oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Yum! Cubed cucumbers with ranch dressing. Perfect evening snack! Pitchers of water with sliced cucumbers floating in it. How chic!
But a week of that is plenty. Soon enough, every horizontal surface of the kitchen was covered with the green dirigibles, and I started looking for other ways to use them.
There’s not much. All that water makes cucumbers unsuitable for cooking. Unless you want to make a cold soup, you’re pretty much left with chopping them in salads or wearing them on your eyeballs to reduce puffiness.
I did find a recipe for a cucumber-watermelon-feta cheese-mint salad with lime dressing. I took it to a July 4th picnic. It was OK, but I’m not sure I’d make it again.
Why can’t our cucumbers be watermelons? I know the answer: if we had as many watermelons as we do cukes, our entire yard and probably house would be strangled by a nightmare web of vines and melons. And though I love watermelon more than any other food, I would probably get sick of them, too.
When my daughter was a pre-teen, her nightly snack was a salad of lettuce and cucumber with feta cheese, vinegar and oil. I made that dish for her every night for months, until she got sick of it and moved on to something else. But I’m reminded that I would buy her cucumbers from the grocery store; they were hard and waxy-nothing like the somewhat ugly but delicious ones we pick from our garden every morning.
And now, as I drive another basket of our cucumbers to a neighbor or friend, I think about all the inferior cucumbers I’ve actually paid for, and how we now have more than we will ever eat-and how lopsided this world can be. But also, how green and bounteous.