COOLING OFF WITH CUCUMBERS

Cool as a cucumber.  English Cucumbers are usually sold wrapped in plastic to reduce water loss.  Therefore, they are not waxed so they generally don't need to be peeled.


The time:  August, 1974.  The place:  Seattle, Washington.  The temp:  hot!  When I think of the peak of summer back then, I picture two things:  a 30” light turquoise oscillating fan perched on our dining room floor…and crisp, cold marinated cucumbers.  Truthfully, a “scorcher” in Seattle in those days (pre-global warming hype) was probably only about 85°.  But I distinctly recall that those abnormally hot days were miserably unbearable.  And when dad went to the trouble of resurrecting that turquoise fan out of the basement, it was officially a sizzler in Seattle.

Since it was too hot to cook in the kitchen, dad would barbecue chicken marinated

in soy sauce and green onions (which always came off the grill looking more black than brown, but still tasted good), and mom would make cold noodles with homemade peanut sauce, a salad of iceberg lettuce with tomato wedges and homemade “thousand island” dressing (mayonnaise mixed with ketchup), and cold marinated cucumbers.  The fan would cool us off from the outside-in; the cold cucumbers would cool us off from the inside-out.

This is another dish that my own kids have grown fond of.  And one summer when I made this for my brother-in-law in Sun Valley, he was still talking about them the next day.  However, it doesn’t need to be a “scorching” 85 to break this one out.  It’s a refreshing recipe, no matter what the temperature is.