Cooking with Junior: Cucumber Yogurt Salad

Some friends of ours who are trying their hand at farming gave us a huge bag of these gnarly little pickling cucumbers.  Aren’t they great?

Naturally I got very excited about pickling.  “We’ll make delicious pickles!” I declared.

And then later that week I remembered that I have two children under the age of five. There’s no way anyone in this wreck of a house is making pickles.  We can barely make a cheese quesadilla without tears and pounding fists. So I mourned the loss of future pickles, and then I went and cleaned the poopy handprints off the stairs.  Toddler life goes on.

Now the question: if we’re not making pickles, what will we do with all the pickling cucumbers?  And the answer was simple: four ingredient, make this in 5 minutes simple.  Beats a weekend pickling project hands down.  But first I digress.

This summer I’m doing a lot of biking, mostly to the pool and back, pulling both Juniors in the trailer behind me.  I also bike two miles down the road to the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre where they have very affordable community education courses.  Twice a week, I crash my way through a beginning hip hop and a not-so-beginning contemporary dance class, the latter with lithe twenty somethings who, for some reason, are not professional ballerinas.  I don’t know how they feel about me flapping alongside them, but I love being there – no one grabs at my shirt or makes any demands of me for a solid hour.

Anyway, all this summertime biking and dancing – if we can call it dancing – makes me crave salty and tangy flavors.

Near the ballet theatre is a great mediterranean buffet, grocery store, and halal butcher called Salem’s where you can find Turkish ayran, a bottled version of a drink that is traditionally yogurt, water, and salt, sometimes with mint leaves.  This cucumber salad is basically ayran, with cucumber chunks thrown in.  And garlic because: garlic.  If you find yourself drinking the leftover yogurty brine at the bottom of the bowl, don’t say I didn’t warn you.  And if you’re even luckier, you’ll meet your esteemed friend Alison at the beautiful new Paulson spray park and she’ll hand you a hunk of freshly baked pita bread, which sops up the leftover yogurt soup beautifully.

This is easy prep: chop your cukes, peeled a bit if you so desire, and throw them into a bowl with a good amount of salt.  Tear up some fresh mint leaves, as much as you can stand, and sprinkle on a high quality dehydrated minced garlic (more about this later.) Dump some plain whole milk yogurt over the whole thing.  If it doesn’t make your mouth sing with tangy and briney flavors, throw in more salt. And if you’re lazy like I am, you’ll dump the whole thing back into the empty yogurt container to store it, which will dismay The Hubs who thinks he has found regular yogurt for his breakfast mueslix only, oops, it’s lumpy and full of green.

Whatever, it’s summer.  Let’s eat salad all day long.

What Junior Can Do:
– Shred mint leaves by hand
– Sprinkle in salt and garlic
– Peel giant stripes down the sides of the cukes

What Can Go Wrong:
– This one is pretty fool proof, both for you and for Junior.  I did test the recipe with the cukes thinly sliced, like for Thai bahn mi pickles, and didn’t like how soggy they immediately became.  This is one time that big chunks are better, and faster.

Recipe Notes:
– Let’s talk briefly about dehydrated garlic.  My mom is the raw fresh garlic queen but I am beleaguered by children when I am cooking, and I don’t often feel like breaking down several fresh cloves of garlic per meal. But at the local food coop I discovered dehydrated minced garlic.  This is the same crispy stuff that makes everything bagel seasoning so flat out everything tasting.  If your only option is chemically preserved, stale, been-on-the-shelf-too-long dehydrated minced garlic, just use fresh.  But what I love about this cucumber salad is the way the crunchy garlic bits develop the longer it sits.  First they are crispy crunchy, like that toasted bagel.  Then they are just sort of … garlicky.  Next they begin to pop in your mouth with a texture like water chestnuts. Have I convinced you yet??  Also: fast. So fast.

– And about salt.  If this salad doesn’t give you a noticeable mouthbomb of salty yogurt cucumber rehydrating freshness, you need more salt.  It was decidedly gross and flaccid when I didn’t salt it enough.  Do not skimp on this crucial summertime ingredient!  Electrolytes!

Cucumber Yogurt Salad