What I eat, apparently

I had briefly considered growing cucumbers this summer. It’s the first year ever since I’d moved out of my parents place some 10ish years ago that I’ve had a yard. Or rather, if you’re willing to define ‘yard’ as ‘lying 4 refrigerators on their sides, tracing the area, then covering that area with dirt plus a few trees plus the remnants of the past several decades worth of gardening remains by the people who’d rented the refrigerator-sized strips of dirt before me’. (Don’t worry, no refrigerators were harmed in the making of my yard.)

In any case, I strongly suspected that I might find myself awash in cucumbers by people who were actually capable of growing them. I was right. So, I found myself with 5 cucumbers. 5 delicious mutant cucumbers. I have to wonder how grocery store cucumbers always end up looking all symmetric and phallic and such, all so similar to each other. What happens to the gazillions of wacky looking cucumbers? All the ones that come out of real gardens, not the Great Cucumber Factory in the Sky the apparently supplies all of these freakish perfecto cucumbers to your and my local grocery stores?

So, what does one do with all of these cucumbers? Why, sunomono of course!

Sunomono is a delightful Japanese salad. The particular form above that I made consisted of me dumping some rice vinegar and sugar in a bowl, mixing, then adding sliced cucumber, a bit of seaweed, some sesame seeds, and stirring again. It’s quite good! It would go quite well with sushi, in fact. Alas, my meaningful and hinting glances at the Sushi Gods have been in vain as of late, so no sushi for me.

Other things you can do with cucumbers that don’t require too much effort:

-Goes well with pretty much any sort of salad.
-Pretend to be an upper class snooty person from the 1980s and make cucumber sandwiches.
-Eat them straight (they’re kinda like apples!) (dip in dressing as needed).
-Stick them in a regular sandwich of the ‘meat and cheese and lettuce and tomato’ variety.
-Garnish your ramen with chopped cucumber.
-Wear one down the front of your pants, in case of emergency.
-Hollow one out and make a flute.
-Dress one in miniature diapers and put it in a carriage.
-Two words: Bathtime Buddy
-Dip one in orange paint and try to convince a really drunk person that it’s a mutant Cheeto.
-If desperate, one could be used as a backup bladder.

And that, right there, is every single possible use for a cucumber. That’s right, folks, throw out your ‘Fun with Cucumbers’ books, because it’s a complete sham.

Oh, the Chick-fil-a, it goes so fast.

Featured today are the salads made of the straggling remnants of chicken from the Cow Appreciation Day debacle of several day’s past. Let’s just say it was good while it lasted.

A box of 4 chicken strips is entirely suitable as well as wholesomely appropriate for festooning the garlands of an otherwise potentially bland salad…or two!

The first of the salads has Ken’s Steak House honey mustard dressing slopped all over it. This is the only honey mustard, in dressing form or honey mustard form really, that you will ever need.

I have a hell of a time finding good salad dressing. Most of it downright sucks. Or it is too tangy. Or too oily. Or too bland. All of which are attributes of ’suck’, come to think of it.

Here is a Venn diagram I have made especially to illustrate this problem:

Mind, you there is a bit of a gap between ’suck’ and ‘not suck’ where many dressings surely lie. There are many dressings I have yet to try, and will probably never try, to save myself from the crushing possibility that with each new dressing I try, and promptly reject, the ’suck’ circle will only expand.

It should be noted, however, that this rule does not seem to apply to restaurant dressings. More often then not, they are comprised of not suck. Maybe my refrigerator has a spoiling effect on dressings, maybe they slip downers into my appetizers at these so-called ‘restaurants’, who knows really?

I don’t give up, though. Oh no. When the going gets tough, the tough seek alternatives.

This baby is seasoned (and quite delightfully, I might add) with pineapple juice, barbecue sauce, and chipotle sauce. Worked much better that I might have expected. I recommend it to all.

So every time I’ve eaten green papaya salad, I’ve gotten sick to my stomach. The first time I ate it was when I’d up and decided to make it myself, not long after having discovered the fabulous joys of Vietnamese salads. See, I was at this party, and this dude Chad burbled on to me in glowing terms of the fabulous merits of shredded papaya, and it’s salad-like uses. So I sought out the papaya in all of it’s shredded goodness.

I was so excited that I forgot to rinse it.

I downed a bunch, and ended up missing work the next day due to the viciously uncomfortable swelling my stomach was experiencing. Only lasted a day at least, and kept me from eating green papaya salad again until a year or so later. That next time, however, was from an actual restaurant. Thusly, the weird bloat only lasted a few hours, and was milder.

My problem is that if something is delicious, I’ll still want to eat it no matter how sick it makes me. This also gives insight to why, every year as a child, I was always ill in early November, having free reign on my Halloween candy.

In any case, I made some more green papaya salad last night, it was quite delightful and the best part? Not a bit of sickness.

It really is the sort of salad that you just want to roll around in!

I’d post a recipe, but you can just google it instead, for I am full of lazy!

I actually have a really hard time making salads. The big problem is the dressing, I suppose. The store dressings I’d get never tasted as good as restaurant dressings. Also, I had a bad habit of buying ranch dressing and continuing to use it for long after the expiration date, whereupon it gets a weird tangy flavor. I was young and innocent in those days, and assumed that salad dressing had the shelf life of any other condiment. Ranch, in particular, has a bad habit of pooping out on you entirely too early, due to it’s large dairy presence.

I also had a Caesar salad phase, and it is practically impossible to buy Caesar dressing from the store and have it taste anything close to good. For me, at least. This is all possibly because I was(am) a cheap bastard and generally avoided anything higher then Kraft-quality, due to the price tag.

Then along came Ken’s Steak House honey mustard dressing. It is a glorious thing indeed.

And also, I should mention, along came Drew, equipped with the Tripps Restaurant gained knowledge of how to make a decent salad. And thusly, we have this baby, which he even made all artful for me:

It uses romaine lettuce, tomato, croutons, sliced almonds, tortilla bits, parmesan cheese, american cheese, and the aforementioned honey mustard dressing. Yay!