Most of the year we grow enough surplus lettuce that we’re the people who always bring salads to parties. By August, though, all the lettuce are rangy, leathery, and bolted. While I do see a few seedlings popping up here and there (re-seeded themselves!), we need a different potluck standard in the meantime. Fortunately, the answer this year has come from the ‘pickles’ my son found at home depot. He’s not much of a vegetable eater (this is the cross I must bear as a parent), but he does appreciate salty, crunchy pickles.
The type he picked out is very spiky, and somewhat seedy–I think they really are pickling cucumbers. Too lazy to actually pickle them, we’ve been using them in sushi, and our new potluck go-to dish–cucumber salad!
Cucumbers look really amazing when they’re growing–I love the curling arms that allow them to climb the tomato cages.
I don’t love cucumbers the way some people do, but this dish isn’t bad. It seems very Turkish to me–summer breakfast in Turkey always seems to feature cucumbers and tomatoes–so perhaps this would be a breakfast salad there. It works as a dinner salad here, where we prefer less healthy breakfast fare. To make it, I just slice up three cucumbers (or how however many pickles we’ve been graced with), add a bunch of cherry tomatoes, and put in a quarter cup of olive oil, salt, pepper and lemon. Viola! A salad sans lettuce.