Photo by Cloned Milkmen, shared via
Flickr.
If I had to pick a favorite vegetable, it would not be the cucumber. I couldn't begin to tell you where, in the produce section of my grocery store, the cucumbers are. Whenever I'm at a salad bar, my tongs skip right past the cukes. In fact, I quite possibly have never, ever in my life bought a cucumber. I think it's safe to say that even though I must have consumed a cucumber somewhere along the way in my adult life, I'd be perfectly fine living without them.
And yet, I grew cucumbers this year. My fella and I have discovered a strange thing about ourselves: we share a habit of growing food that
we don't actually plan on eating. Bizzare, huh?
I knew you'd ask so some of those foods are corn, cabbage, and, yes, cucumbers. Sometimes just growing things is a ton of fun.
So, even though I had no intention of actually eating cucumbers, they called to me from a little four-pack tray at the farmer's market late in May... it might have even been early June. I bought them. I put them in a giant pot underneath my upside-down tomato plants. They grew. And it just so happened that I thought they were pretty.
Those beautiful green cucumbers were then calling to me to eat them, and knowing that I am terribly strange and struggle to notice the delish-ness that is a cucumber, I began to fret. And I worried. And I wrung my hands. And I stared at those cucumbers wondering what in the world I was going to do if I didn't stuff them in a sandwich or slice them into a salad.
And then, as I searched that useful thing called the internet, I found a recipe for tzatziki, and I realized that in sauce over falafel, I ADORE cucumbers!
Out of the several recipes I found, I discovered a few things:
- Unless you're feeding all your cousins plus your in-laws or unless you think a tall glass of tzatziki sauce sounds appetizing, don't use a recipe that calls for 2 cups of yogurt. One cup was plenty for four falafel sandwiches, and I had oodles left over.
- All of the recipes called for a range of two cups yogurt per 1/2 cucumber, peeled and drained all the way to one cup yogurt to two cucumbers, peeled and drained. I had two cukes poised and ready to go, yet I was pretty pleased flavor of one cup yogurt per cuke.
- Decide about texture before you put all the ingredients in the processor. I wish I'd had just a little more texture to my tzatziki. Next time I'll keep about a third out to finely chop and stir in after the processing.
- Follow the directions that say to make the sauce ahead of time and chill in the fridge for a half hour before use. It firms up the sauce nicely.
So if you have some cukes around and need something to do with them, you are now armed with all the tips you need to ace this project the first time through. Here's one recipe you can try.
We took these flatbread sandwiches to an outdoor showing of the latest Indiana Jones movie at the university here in town. Discovery #5? It's good to pack extra on a picnic! Turns out cucumbers aren't so bad.
Learn about our privacy policy
Subscribe via 