"CucumberSalad" news and stories

Got a bumper crop of cukes in your garden -- or picked up a bunch on sale at the market?

Thirsty? Eat a cuke. Heat getting to you? Reach for a cuke. Puffy eyes? Throw a couple of chilled cucumber slices on your closed lids and you'll be puffy no more. Unless, of course, you're that Puffy. Liquid rich and with only 13 calories a cup, cucumbers are made for days when just the thought of a hot meal makes you sweat.

This cucumber salad, from blogger erincooks, is a simple combination -- her recipe calls for English cukes, red onion, dill, apple cider vinegar, sugar and water. Curtis Stone mixes cucumbers and dill as well, but in his recipe he uses olive oil and lemon juice. Gail Simmons is another cucumber fan, and in her recipe she pickles the cukes and pairs them with glazed salmon. You can also go tropical, as in this recipe, which throws in mangoes, avocado and cilantro. And so goes the daily prescription for keeping it cool.

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Braised cucumbers. Photo: Brent Ridge, Beekman 1802.

Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell are the farmers and innovators behind Beekman 1802, a 200-year-old estate and farm in upstate New York. We'll be running recipes, gorgeous photos and tales from the farm as their crops come into season.

By Brent Ridge with Sandy Gluck

Like many people who love food (and watching cooking shows on TV), I plopped myself down in a cool theater during last week's heat wave to watch Meryl Streep expertly channel Julia Child.

What stuck with me after leaving the theater was not Streep's pitch-perfect accent, but the very brief mention of a recipe for braised cucumbers.

It is quite possible that my brain latched onto this because at the very moment I was having a conundrum with what to do with all the cucumbers we've been blessed with from the heirloom garden this year (after a disastrous beetle infestation in 2008).

Our heirloom cukes and an amazing recipe after the jump.

In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.

When I have access to fresh produce, cucumber season becomes one of my favorite times of the year. Although it runs from May to August, the wonderful green beauties won't reach their full flourish until later in the summer. Still, it's hard to resist the cool, summery flavor of the first cukes of the season. With that in mind, I decided to flip through my family cookbook in search of some great cucumber recipes.

My Aunt Renie's cucumber salad manages to halve the distance between sharp and smooth, sweet and sour, creamy and intense. In my adjusted version, I cut back on the onions, switched in Greek yogurt and tossed in some fresh dill.

The final version had the soothing coolness of a traditional cucumber salad, but also retained a nice vinegar tang that keeps me on my toes. This is great by itself, or as an accompaniment to barbecue or any other strongly seasoned dish.

Get the cucumber salad recipe after the jump!

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