Recipe: Cucumber Salad

Find a big lidded container. Mine was 10 cups (a little more than 2 liters.)

Find some cucumbers. I used one super-gigantic one and one fairly normal one, and I would have had room for at least 2 more normal ones.
Peel the green rind off the cucumbers and discard.
Then, keep peeling! Making long, thin, see-through strips of cucumber.
Stop when you get so close to the middle that the seeds keep you from cutting nice strips.
Take a sweet onion and cut into fine slivers.
Put the onion slivers and the cucumber strips into your container.

In a small pan, combine vinegar and water.
You can use:
1/2 cup white vinegar, a cup water and 1/2 cup sugar
OR equal parts seasoned rice wine vinegar and water, with a couple spoonfuls of sugar. 

Bring that to a boil, and pour it over the cucumber and onion mixture. Stir and let sit.

You can stir in some herbs - I used about a teaspoon of dill.

When cool, refrigerate.

It's sort of a salad and sort of a pickle - intensely flavored, refreshing on a hot day, good on a ham sandwich. I made it with CRCC cucumbers, which are excellent.

Asian vinegar is in the international food aisle at the grocery store - it's less acidic than regular vinegar, and has some sugar already in it. I use this brand:




or this one            
     















both delicious, and widely available. Store it in the fridge once it's open (unlike normal vinegar.)

Link to the shrimp recipe (if I can get away with it.)

I know the NY Times occasionally objects when civilians link to their content, but I'm going to give this a try.

Here is a recipe I've been making for a really long time. I saw it in the Times, a Wednesday food section, and I had it tacked to the corkboard in my kitchen for years. Now I have it memorized (though I rarely trust my memory for recipes, since, as my recent birthday cake slip-up* indicates, I'm not that precise even when I have the text in front of me.) I believe (guessing, from the notes in my kitchen notebook) that I clipped this recipe about 1997 or so.

I made this tonight for friends, which was a bit of a risk - it's got very strong flavors, and I can imagine someone finding it inedible. Happily, both the shrimp devotee and the more hesitant friend loved it. Even Ian ate a bite!

I usually eat this with white rice, but was too lazy for rice tonight - I bought a baguette, which we made very short work of. We had green beans and asperagas, which was also well received. (I cut up some cucumbers for this kids, and that made me realize that some kind of cucumber side dish would be really good with this, to contrast the salty and sharp flavors. )

In related food news, Ian and I had a tremendously successful first trip to the Grand Everyday Fresh Mart in South Laurel. Large selection of very nice produce at low prices, first of all, which is what I was looking for. (Seriously - Driscoll strawberries for 2.19 instead of 2.59, grapes for .99 a pound instead of $1.99. Large (don't know the official designation, but they were BIG) shrimp for 4.99/pound )(cheaper if I had been prepared to deal with the heads, which I was not). Live crabs and lots of fish on ice, which, along with making me what to cook them, make the trip much more exciting for Ian. The prices are competitive with the PanAm Latin American market, but it's much bigger and the produce looks nicer. Like the PanAm, it's pretty chaotic, but that suits me fine.

*The cake mistake - I have a lovely recipe for pound cake, from this excellent book which I totally recommend. Yes, it's got some jello salads and some things which require cans of mushroom soup. So don't make those. Duh. The things that are good are really good, including the sour cream pound cake recipe, which is what I made for Eric's birthday Friday. I used yogurt instead of sour cream, and where the recipe calls for 6 eggs, I only remembered to put in 3. It's still absolutely delicious. It's just a little more, um, "substantial".