Cucumbers

Well, we found a few cucumber recipes to try. We had a lot of cucumbers; about a dozen, not even including a couple we cooked up earlier last week.

Recipe 1: Fried Cucumbers
Instead of bread crumbs, we used the 'breading' from Girl Gone Primal's chicken fingers recipe. It mostly worked, and they were tasty with a little sriracha sauce on top, but I'm not sure we'll make them again; they got soggy pretty quickly, and after that the texture was a little off-putting. We didn't even finish the ones we made, which is too bad because that was the last of my almond flour; time to get more almonds to grind up.

Recipe 2: Cucumbers in Cream Sauce
We'll probably make this one again. The onion cuts the coolness of the cucumbers pretty well. We'll use quite a bit less salt, though; the salt in this batch is a little overpowering. Still, it's tasty, and it's not just cucumber.

Recipe 3: Spicy Cucumbers
We'll make this one again too. We had a few substitutions, though; sesame oil instead of corn oil, and dried chipotle peppers due to lack of finding any dried chili peppers. I ended up adding some red pepper flakes too. It's pretty good, with a nice burn (that's easily cut by the cucumbers in cream mentioned above) which we both enjoy, and the extra cooking oil was used to make some awesome chicken. We'll halve the sugar next time though, I think a little is needed but certainly not that much. I may try using honey instead.

Well, as of Friday, all the cucumbers we had in the house were at least part of a dish of some sort. We had quite a bit left over from recipes 2 and 3, and we've got a lot of pickles, but for a little while, our house was free of unadulterated cucumbers.

Of course on Saturday we picked up more from the CSA. Six more, in fact; two big salad cucumbers, and four smaller pickling cucumbers. So yesterday was cooking time again.

We made more pickles. Now we have two pints of crinkle-cut sweet pickles in the works, and a pint of fennel-mustard spear pickles. Hopefully they all come out well! I've never tried fennel pickles, but we got fennel from the CSA so we thought we'd try it. We also made 2 pints of veggie salsa with all our tomatoes, squash, bell peppers, and onion, and then we made a pint of peach salsa with all the peaches we got this week. Both came out pretty tasty. I'm going to have to work on some good cracker recipes so I can enjoy all the salsa. Maybe sweet potato chips would be good with the peach.

We also opened the first jar of pickles last night! I don't think I'd call them dill, but they're definitely pickles, and I like them. It's good that pickles taste so different from plain cucumbers; we're still eating both of the cucumber dishes we made last week. But, once again, and for longer this time, the house is cucumber-free.