Like all these recipes, adapt the herbs to whatever you have on hand and your household prefers. This recipe appeared in Fine Cooking magazine in August 2011.
Summer Vegetable Soup with Dill
cucumbers
Grilled Chicken and Potatoes with Tomato and Cucumber Salad
This recipe comes from the March 2013 edition of Fine Cooking magazine. The combination of olive oil, lemon, anchovy and garlic is one of my favorite marinades for any kind of grilling. If you have a little time, you can use the vinaigrette to marinate the chicken for up to 4 hours before grilling. Delicious.
Pickled Cabbage
This traditional breakfast pickle is part of a family of Japanese quick-salted pickles. Some of you may grow shiso. If not, I’ve found it at the Buford Highway Farmers Market. It’s definitely traditional, but you can leave it out.
Ajad (Thai Cucumber Relish)
This relish is adapted from a recipe in Thai Street Food by David Thompson. Substitute some of your sweet onion instead of the shallots if you like. And any hot pepper will do here – or use dried red chile flakes for a little bit of heat.
Garlic Dill Pickles
Refrigerator dill pickles could not be easier to make. Last year when my garden was producing a huge crop of cucumbers, I made up the brine and refrigerated it. When I came in with my cucumbers-of-the-day, I would rinse them and put them into quart jars, add dill, etc. and fill the jar with brine. Tucked into the spare refrigerator to “ferment”, these pickles make half sours in a day or two, and full sours in a week. They’ll keep for a month or so, but really not much longer since they’re not processed. The nice thing is that you can just make up a jar or two. So if you want to give it a try, don’t worry about needing 3 pounds of cucumbers. Make up the brine and fill your jars with as many of this week’s cucumbers as you want to pickle. We’ll cross our fingers that there are more cucumbers in our future.
Santa Fe Summer Pot
Or how about this idea for a dish that will use up some tomatoes and require no cooking (if you buy precooked shrimp)? It’s from “The Splendid Table’s How to Eat Supper: Recipes, Stories and Opinions from Public Radio’s Award-Winning Food Show” by Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift (Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2008). The shrimp could be switched out for tofu, tempeh, chicken, meats or other fish.
Serves 4
Greek Salad with Pork Tenderloin and Lemon-Basil Vinaigrette
You can substitute chicken or shrimp here.
Smashed Cucumbers
I never get tired of just eating cucumbers like an apple but maybe you’re ready for a new cucumber salad idea. Smashed cucumbers are quite the thing. This recipe’s adapted from one in the New York Times which adapted it from a recipe from Superiority Burger, a vegan burger restaurant in Manhattan.
Cucumber and Onion Salad
This easy recipe is adapted from one prepared by Seth Freedman, the East Atlanta Village Farmers market chef. It’s really a quick pickle and will keep in your refrigerator for up to a week, with the cucumbers and onions softening and becoming more pickle-like the longer they sit in the brine.
Yogurt-Cucumber Dressing/Dip
I’m sharing two dips, one of which use cucumbers in the recipe. Both would work just as well as a salad dressing, but I was thinking of them as dips for fingers of fennel and kohlrabi, and disks of summer squash and cucumber. Green Goddess Dressing is traditionally made with a mixture of herbs and anchovies, but you can adjust it to suit your household’s taste.