Jul 14, 2017 4 min read

By this time most summers, I’m filling this space with my annual whining about zucchini. If you’ve followed my column through any of the past 20 years I’ve been writing it, then you know that after a certain point, I consider zucchini to be a July plague along the lines of mosquitoes or rainy days.

We didn’t plant zucchini this year. Instead, we are being inundated with a bumper crop of the smaller green garden dirigible – cucumbers. Lying there under all those vines, they look like zucchini, and isn’t it funny that the nicknames rhyme: zukes and cukes.

Cukes have taken over the kitchen, stashed in bowls perched on every horizontal surface. Mornings, the farmer goes out and picks the ones that burst to ripeness overnight as they drank in all this rain. And every morning I look at the newest members of our cuke clan and think, how will we possibly eat all of them?

I don’t really like cucumbers. My grandmother would slice them very thin and mix with onions for a salad dressed with vinegar and oil. The flavor was good, but I never cared for the texture – at once slippery and crunchy. My daughter went through a stage several years ago where she ate a salad with lettuce, cucumbers and feta cheese every night before bed. She outgrew that, as she has every food phase, but boy could we use that craving now.

You can find hundreds of cucumber recipes, but they are all cold and mostly salad. Can you even cook with a cucumber? I’m guessing that once all the rain is wrung out, there’s not much left to eat.

For a July 4th picnic at a friend’s house, I made a salad of cucumber, watermelon and feta cheese. Cukes and melon are first cousins, after all, and the flavors mixed well. I had three helpings, but when I returned to the buffet I noticed I was the only one. Maybe the feta was off-putting.

The farmer refuses to waste food, a noble conviction that has him eating cucumbers with everything except his breakfast granola, and I wouldn’t doubt if he chopped some into that bowl, too. But even he is having trouble keeping up. In recent days, the cuke population in the kitchen has doubled.

We are starting to offload them wherever we can. I took some to a cooking camp, and we have arranged a drop-off to some neighbors. Before the crop is finished, we might have to open a vegetable stand out on the sidewalk.

Health spas and massage places often serve water with slices of cucumber in it. I always enjoy that part of the experience; I feel healthier knowing there’s a vegetable bobbing in there. Once, the woman doing my facial put slices of cucumber on my eyes, to reduce puffiness. Speaking of puffy, how about a full-body cucumber wrap?

Summers during college, I worked on Simmons Farm in Peters Township, hoeing corn and planting tomatoes and then picking all of it. On cucumber days we would carry little salt packets in our pockets, to better enjoy the occasional cuke we’d eat. Even then, right off the vine and sprinkled with salt, I really didn’t like them.

And still don’t. I look around the kitchen at the green bounty and then look out the window and see there’s so much more still to come. All this summer rain we’ve had? Gallons of it is sitting in bowls on my kitchen counter, waiting.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.