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.

Chopity, chop

I truly started to wonder about my eating habits when I found myself heading down to the garage for an axe so that I could finish lunch.

I’m afraid you’ve been suckered into this blog post by the promise of drama, action and violence. Truth be known, I’m going to spend most of the time talking about tofu (although I promise to come back to the axe later).

Go on, be honest: would you have bothered even opening the blog if I was more upfront and started writing about the T word in the first paragraph?

I was a vegetarian for many years, during which time I ate a fair amount of tofu. Most of it was nice enough, apart from one cruel concoction I experienced at 20,000 feet.

I travelled a lot during my vegetarian phase and, despite having flown on most of the world’s worst airlines, the only inedible vegetarian meal I ever encountered was the scrambled tofu and parsley horror on an Air New Zealand red-eye flight to Wellington. What were they thinking?! To this day I’m convinced it was a ploy to punish their vegetarian customers.

I now eat meat, but my love of Asian food leads to frequent tofu encounters.

Earlier this week, on the way back from skiving off work to check out Sabatini’s knitwear sale, I saw the Wesley market in action and decided to stop and take a look. Even though I’ve lived near the market for more than a decade, I keep forgetting about its existence and have never been until now.

It’s only a small market – probably a dozen fruit and vege stalls, a couple of food stalls, and a few other bits and pieces. The only out-of-the-ordinary offering was a tiny stall selling a selection of home-made tofu products. Like a moth to the flame, I was drawn to take a closer look.

Here’s what I ended up buying:   

Marinated bean skin

  

Plain bean skin

The stall owner suggested a few ways to prepare these, as did the ever-useful Internet. So, come lunch time, I got cooking - with delicious results. The marinated ‘bean skin’ was particularly nice. I think it’s flavoured with five-spice and soy sauce. It was tasty on its own, and even nicer when included the salad recipe at the end of this blog.

Deep-fried tofu

 As for the axe, I felt like rounding off lunch with something sweet and, tempted though I was to offset all that healthiness with a big slab of cake, for once I exercised some willpower and resisted.

I had a drinking coconut in the fridge, from which I’d extracted the juice for a Nonya dessert I made the other night. I’d only managed to cut a little hole in the top, which was large enough to let the juice out, but my kitchen knives weren’t up to the task of carving larger hole from which to extract the soft flesh.

So it was off to the woodpile to get a better tool for the job. Trouble was, the chopping block and axe were buried under a mountain kitchen renovation detritus and other general crap in our garage. Too lazy to move it all out of the way, I burrowed my way through stacks of polystyrene underfloor insulation, a bunch of bicycles and bicycle parts, and rolls of carpet and attempted to cleave the coconut.

There was barely any room to swing the axe so all I could manage do without putting my fingers at risk was cut a slightly larger hole, just wide enough to accommodate a dessert spoon.

And that, I’m afraid, is all I have to report. Not very exciting, really, but not your everyday lunch experience either.

Cucumber and tofu ‘noodle’ salad

No matter what your foodie preferences may be, this simple salad hits the mark: sweet, sour, salty, crisp, soft, gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, low-cholesterol. Most importantly, it’s really tasty! I made some more to go with dinner the next night and, to my surprise, the kids liked it - even fussy Rory.


                                                                                     Salad dressing

Bean skin strips stir-fried with chilli, ginger and garlic (left),
cucumber and tofu noodle salad (right).

Mix to taste:

Vegetable (or other bland) cooking oil

Chinese black vinegar

Salt

Sugar

A few drops sesame oil

You could add some chilli flakes and garlic for extra zing

Salad

Cut marinated tofu skin into thin strips and mix with peeled, seeded cucumber that has been julienned. Pour over the dressing. You could substitute any crisp, crunchy vegetable: lettuce, julienned or grated carrot, finely shredded cabbage, etc.