"cucumber" news and stories

Basket of cucumbers. Photo: La Grande Farmers' Market, Flickr

• When it's just too darned hot to cook, a cucumber dish can save the day.
• Wine retailers offer a dozen thirst-quenching vino suggestions, including a 2008 Star Tree Chardonnay.
• Maine's Migis Lodge offers cuisine that treads the line between elegant and casual.
• How to take a Mexican Bean and Rice Salad and lower its fat.
• We'll never be able to resist eating out now that restaurants have started tweeting about all their tasty fare on Twitter.
• Dispatches discovers a Chili Fest, an all-you-can-eat chocolate buffet, centennial farming and a shore dinner.

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Turkish Cucumbers. Photo: beautifulcataya, Flickr

Twelve separate cucumber thefts have put Australian police in a pickle.

According to ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), cucumber capers have targeted market farmers in Adelaide over the past three months, stealing more than $10,000 worth of the popular vegetable.

"It's certainly a unique theft," Chief Inspector Kym Zander told ABC.

Few leads are reported at this point, but police are speculating as to all possible motives, including the case of a jealous farmer.

"We're looking at the possibility that it may be a grower that's had a failed crop and he's substituting through theft," Zander said.

Police do believe the timing of the thefts shows the thieves are in the know.

"Somebody has the knowledge that cucumbers are being picked at the appropriate time, they're being stored in boxes, buckets or bags -- and overnight the thefts are occurring," Zander tells ABC News reporter Pete McDonald.

Even if there was a lead, Zander admits it is hard to determine which cucumbers are the stolen ones.

Embezzled cukes could be sold right under investigator's noses at local grocery stores and markets, as there is no way to detect a cucumber's origin.

The pepquiños are coming, the pepquiños are coming.

Hot off the news that it's now tiny melon season in Britain, the producers of what may just be the world's only bite-sized melon -- the pepquiño -- say they're growing these grape-size fruits on New York's Long Island.

"It's already in America, but very, very small," Nicolas Mazard, the U.S. manager of Koppert Cress, told Slashfood Thursday. "So it will be ready this summer."

Learn how to eat these 3/4-inch fruits after the jump.

For your lunchtime pleasure, I'm presenting a series of my favorite bento boxes. Bento are Japanese home-prepared meals served in special boxes, usually eaten for lunch at work or school. These days, bento enthusiasts from all over the world share their creations on Flickr.

I'm loving this star-themed bento, thrown together from fridge leftovers, from Catdraco on the Live Journal bento site. We've got cukes with stars cut out of the center, filled with same-shaped sweet potatos. The noodles are rice vermicelli, and there are tofu cubes with soy and sesame oil. The car is a hard-boiled egg.

Source

When I was a teenager, George Orwell's 1984 was my favorite book, both for its writing, which I thought was superb, and for its depressing viewpoint, which beautifully dovetailed with my own adolescent angst. One of my favorite parts was Orwell's description of the effects of "Victory Gin," the official hard liquor of English Socialism:

Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful.

When I first tried cheap tequila, I came to the conclusion that it was Orwell's famed Victory Gin. Oily, hard to swallow, and packing a wallop, it was also among the most popular tipples in the mid 1980's, far outstripping gin, which seemed pale and weak by comparison. If tequila was a hard whack with a rubber club, gin was a sip of chilled perfume.