Cucurbit surprise

As much as I love cooking, I’m no great fan of preparing weekday meals after a busy day at work – especially when dinner time looms large and I’m feeling distracted and/or completely uninspired.

Just such a dilemma presented itself the other day.  As much as I’d like to have blamed work pressures for my missing mojo, I’ve just returned from a month’s summer break, and am not especially busy at work.

I couldn’t think of anything I really felt like eating, much less cooking, which didn’t help.  All I knew was that I wasn’t in the mood for fish, chicken, lamb or beef.  And, as some of you know, I’m never in the mood for pork.

I’ve got two vacuum packed mutton birds in the downstairs fridge for a bit of rainy day experimentation, but I wasn’t feeling brave enough to give them a go.

And then it hit me; what about a cucurbit themed dinner?

Yeah, yeah, I know that's weird and probably a little too geeky but, thanks to my gardening prowess, I had lots of cucurbits lurking in the fridge and it seemed a shame to waste them. 

From left: courgette, Lebanese cucumber,
tindora (a mysterious vege I bought from an
Indian grocery store).

A blizzard of cucurbit cookery ensued.  I turned the Lebanese cucumbers into an old favourite: Eastern European sweet and sour cucumber, a recipe given to me by my uncle's Hungarian mother-in-law:

Eastern European sweet and sour cucumber salad

2 cucumbers
Salt
1 cup water
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup white wine or cider vinegar
Fresh dill fronds to taste (optional)

Peel cucumbers and remove the seeds.  Slice very thinly and place in a colander.  Sprinkle generously with salt and leave to drain for an hour. 

While the cucumber is draining, make the dressing by gently heating the water, sugar and vinegar until the sugar has dissolved.  Adjust sugar and vinegar quantities to suit your own tastes.  Cool mixture.

Squeeze as much of the liquid out of the cucumber as you can.  Most of the salt will drain away, so there is no need to rinse the cucumber.  Put the cucumber into a serving bowl and pour over the dressing, which will instantly be absorbed by the cucumber.

Add a little chopped dill to taste (I suggest going pretty easy on it as it can be quite overpowering).

Serve the salad lightly chilled.

That done, I turned my hand to the courgettes and decided to stuff, then bake them.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve eaten some stuffed courgette horrors in my time: bland, watery, boring.  What I’ve discovered is that they need to be really well seasoned, so worry about your arteries another day and use lots of salt if you decide to get stuffing.

I won’t give you the recipe because I made it up as I went along out of all sorts of leftovers lurking in the fridge, including cubes of roast lamb and cubes of walnut stuffed salted aubergines pickled in oil. 

This filling might look like the aftermath of a dog’s dinner, but was  delicious.  Even Rory liked it.














Baked, stuffed courgette. Fortunately
the end result looked far more
appetising than the filling would
have suggested.





Finally it was tindora time.  I’d never eaten tindora before and, until I bought them, hadn’t even heard of them.  But they looked cute and I was feeling adventurous, so into my shopping basket they went.

Fortunately there was no shortage of tindora recipes on the Internet.  Unfortunately I discovered that I don’t like tindora.  In their defence, they have an appealing crunchiness (a bit like a crisp dill pickle in texture) and their blandness makes them a good carrier for whatever flavours you want to cook them with.



Tindora innards.

But they had a background bitterness that I disliked, and I knew my family would also dislike, so I didn’t bother serving them up.

So there endeth my cucurbit extravaganza...or so I thought.  A rare and welcome run of fine weather saw my cucumber and courgette plants burst into another reproductive frenzy and I’m back to square one again.

No prizes for guessing what’s going to be featuring heavily on our dinner menu this coming week.