Friday: An oldie but a goodie

 

Cucumber-purslane salad with chickpeas and pink radish. 

This is our first purslane of the season - we like to make this cool salad with it, dressed in some lemon juice and olive oil.

Friday: Cold cuke salad

Cucumber-dill-yogurt salad.

This was our improvised cool dinner for a rather hot evening.  We ate it with some crusty bread and Pawlet cheese, and followed up with strawberries.  It's quite similar to this soup, except we didn't bother with marination and didn't add quite as much liquid.

These "burpless" cucumbers had a funny gradient-like coloration.

Monday: Brief concession to the agroindustrial complex

Chana dal with cucumbers.

Yes, you've seen this before - but it's a meal that still tastes good even if you have to use shink-wrapped, industrial cucumbers.

Wednesday: Bringing it dal back home

Chana dal with cucumber.

This recipe is an old favorite of ours - another filling dish that can be made when quality vegetables are sparse. Strictly speaking, it should be made with bottle gourd (dudhi or lauki), which is easy enough to come by if you frequent the Indian market. Cucumber makes an adequate substitute, however, and that's what we used here.

The recipe comes from Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East, one of our first cookbooks.

Saturday: Tea Sandwiches

Tea sandwiches with several fillings: egg salad, smoked salmon-dill-caper, red radish, watercress, and marinated cucumber.

For a change of pace, this meal was almost entirely NON-local (with the exception of the egg salad we made, which included some local pickles from Rick's Picks, and the smoked Atlantic salmon). But Santa promised Lizz's parents some tea sandwiches, and tea sandwiches are what they got!

Tea sandwiches are generally made with very thin-sliced soft white bread from which the crusts have been removed, and usually contain mayonnaise. They can have many types of fillings, but we made a few classic ones. The radishes were sliced into slim rounds, salted and left to sit for twenty minutes or so, and then rinsed. This process removes a little of the bitterness and makes them crisp.

Our favorite may have been the cucumbers, which we marinated in this improvised manner: two medium-large cucumbers were peeled and sliced as finely as possible. Then we mixed together two minced garlic cloves, about four tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, the juice of one entire lemon, about 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne, and some salt to taste. The cucumbers were added, stirred in thoroughly, and left to marinate for maybe twenty minutes to a half hour. We stirred the mixture every once in a while; at first the liquid collected at the bottom, but it accumulated as the cukes marinated.

Saturday lunch: Salad days

Tasty salad of sucrine lettuce, baby swiss chard, Kirby cucumbers, green heirloom tomato, chopped walnuts, sliced Bosc pear, and chevre. (Pictured in front of a little bit of fall bounty.)

We dressed this salad with a drizzle each of olive oil and champagne vinaigrette, and served it with some multigrain bread and a glass of apple cider.

Wednesday: A Summery Chilled Soup

Chilled cucumber-dill-yogurt soup.

Although we're not opposed to making hot soups in summer, there's a certain logic to a chilled soup on a hot day. This is a quick and easy recipe that I got from my parents, and something that Giselle and I managed to cook when we were first starting out.

Good ingredients are always important, but this is the kind of dish where quality really matters, because it's so simple. We used heirloom Kirby cucumbers, Rocambole garlic, and fresh yogurt from our local dairy, Milk Thistle Farm.

CHILLED CUCUMBER SOUP

1 1/2 cups cucumber, peeled, seeded, then diced
2 tbsp chopped fresh dill
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
2 tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 - 1/2 cup walnut, chopped (optional)
1 - 1 1/2 cups plain yogurt

Mix all but yogurt and refrigerate, letting it marinate, 5 hours or more (overnight is fine). When ready to serve, add the yogurt and stir to mix. Serves 2.

Saturday sandwiches (also, alliteration)

Post-greenmarketing sandwiches: green Southern curly and red mustard greens, Kirby cukes, Brandywine heirloom tomatoes, "womanchego" cheese, and whole-grain mustard on whole wheat levain bread. (With this week's pretty fruit in the background.)

For anyone who's wondering, "levain" is a bread made from a pre-fermented starter, much like sourdough, so no yeast is added.

Saturday borscht

Chilled beet borscht (with scallion, dill, and cucumber).

There are many different variations on borscht - we wanted something seasonally appropriate, so we made this recipe in which a cucumber and some cooked beets are grated and mixed with other seasonings to make a chilled soup.

Saturday sandwiches

After some successful greenmarketing we made these quick sandwiches of Rappleree cheese, Persian cukes, purple radishes and grainy mustard on sourdough bread. For a flavor contrast we added a few groundcherries (also called "husk cherries") on the side.

Groundcherries come "individually wrapped," as you can see above - inside, they're delicious little yellow orbs with a texture like a tiny, firm tomato and a sweet flavor reminiscent of pineapple:


Unwrapped groundcherry with radish and cucumber for scale

They're only available at this time of year and we highly recommend them.

Saturday picnic lunch

A friend of ours was dogsitting, so we headed out to Morningside Park today for some idyllic doggie picnic time. The sandwiches we brought were made with fresh bread from the greenmarket, Vivace Bambino cheese, grainy mustard, lemon cukes, and purple radish sprouts.

The bean salad incorporated the first sweet peppers we've bought this year:



Lemon cukes, besides being yellow and lemon-shaped, do actually taste a bit less grassy and more lemon-like than an average cucumber. They have a nice dense consistency, whiteish flesh, and their seeds are surrounded by neon green jelly. Here is a lemon cuke looming ominously before the peppers:



Our white bean salad included the diced sweet peppers, minced shallot, garlic scapes, cilantro, parsley, olive oil, red wine vinegar, and lemon juice.

Leisurely Saturday lunch

Shortly after this picture was taken, we assembled these ingredients into delicious levain-Persian cuke-Vivace Bambino-radish sandwiches, tied together by a thin layer of dijon mustard.

A simple Sunday dinner

Puntarelle in Salsa d'Acciughe (puntarella chicory salad with anchovy dressing) with Aged Bloomsday cheese and Kirby cucumber sandwich, accompanied by a glass of cherbat (Middle Eastern lemonade). Before any Italians out there write in to complain, this particular chicory is not truly puntarella, which is a specific varietal of Catalogna chicory. But it's close enough, and tastes delicious with the garlic-anchovy dressing.