This year’s planting hasn’t been nearly as prolific, so I’ve been a bit more mindful about how best to prepare them. Gazpacho, pickles and cucumber salad are easy and tasty, but I wanted to do something unexpected with this limited crop of cukes.
Culinarian Elizabeth Heiskell offers a cooling cucumber dip in her latest cookbook, “Come On Over! Southern Delicious for Every Day and Every Occasion” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30). The recipe is a simple mix of cucumber pulp; dairy staples sour cream, Greek yogurt and mayonnaise; dill, garlic, salt and pepper for seasoning; and hits of vinegar and lemon juice for acid. But simple can be sublime.
“I beg you to try this knockout,” she writes in the headnote. Besides serving the chilled dip with crudités and crostini (or just grab a bag of tortilla chips as I did), she suggests pairing it with lamb, cold-poached salmon, or even hamburgers and hot dogs.
Heiskell calls for the cucumbers to be peeled before processing them, but if you’ve got unwaxed organic cucumbers, you don’t have to discard those long green strips. Mads Refslund, who co-founded famed NOMA restaurant in Denmark with Rene Redzepi, proposes giving peels a second life in his ode to trash cooking, “Scraps, Wilt & Weeds: Turning Wasted Food Into Plenty” (Grand Central Publishing, 2017). Brine and time (3 to 5 days) are all it takes for cucumber peels to become sour enough to add to a banh mi, burger or Reuben.
Credit: Ligaya Figueras
Credit: Ligaya Figueras
Excerpted from “Come On Over! Southern Delicious for Every Day and Every Occasion” © 2021 by Elizabeth Heiskell. Reproduced by permission of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
Excerpted from “Scraps, Wilt & Weeds: Turning Wasted Food Into Plenty” by Mads Refslund and Tama Matsuoka Wong. Copyright © 2017 by Mads Refslund and Tama Matsuoka Wong. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.
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