C is for Cucumbers

These English cucumbers actually have Asian origins.

Yesterday, I said that I was going to talk about a vegetable today--or maybe not. Cucumbers fit that bill since they are one of those items of produce that can be considered a fruit or a vegetable depending if you use a botanical or food use definition. But did you know that by law, cucumbers are vegetables? That's based on a Supreme Court decision in the Nix vs Hedden case in 1893 involving the Tariff Act of 1883 which placed a tax on imported vegetables but not fruits. The case focused on tomatoes and whether they were a fruit or vegetable. The court decided that the common use of the tomato as a vegetable would be the definition for the tariffs not the botanical definition. They also clarified the standing for cucumbers, beans, squash, and peas as vegetables. (Are peas and beans seeds or vegetables?)

And since I was on the subject of cucumbers, I decided to see if I could clarify the whole burping subject. It turns out that the naturally occurring, bitter chemical cucurbitacin in cucumbers is the culprit. Cucurbitacin causes stomach distress in animals to serve as a deterrent from being eaten before it has time to produce seeds. Over the years, cucumbers have been bred to contain less cucurbitacin and be milder tasting and friendlier to the digestive tract. Cucumbers advertised as burpless produce less cucurbitacin especially during hot and dry weather when production of it increases. (Note to self: Make sure to water cucumber plants when it is hot and dry.) Also, cucurbitacin tends to concentrate in the ends, so cutting them off may help with the bitter taste.

One last thing for this cucumber post, below I've copied a post I did a couple of years ago about cucumber soup. Soon the cucumbers will be everywhere and this might be a way to use some of them up. Enjoy.

_______________________________________

Cucumber Soup

Sunday I posted about cucumbers I had been given and the the cold soup I made from them. Anne at Cooking and All that Jazz asked for the recipe. I almost decided that the posting could wait for another day when I wasn't so wrung out from the heat. But there's not a break in the weather in the foreseeable future, so now is as good of a time as tomorrow or the next day, or the next day.  Too bad my husband finished the rest of the soup, because some cool cucumber soup would hit the spot right now. And I would have had a picture for you.  Oh, well. It was very easy, so I'll make some more. Here's the original recipe that came from Epicurious.com. I've cut and pasted so spacing, etc. may look a little wonky.

YIELD

 

Serves 6

INGREDIENTS

1. • 5 cucumbers
   • 1/2 cup chopped parsley
   • 6 scallions, chopped
   • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
   • 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
   • 1 quart buttermilk
   • 1 pint yogurt
   • Salt and freshly ground pepper

   • PREPARATION

     1. 1. Peel cucumbers and cut them in half, scraping out seeds. Sprinkle the cucumbers with salt and let them stand 30 minutes. Drain excess water.
        2. Chop the cucumbers coarsely and put the pieces in the blender along with scallions, dill, lemon juice, buttermilk, and yogurt. Blend at high speed. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Chill well before serving.

My sister gave me this recipe. She and I both modified it with the these results. 

She used two small onions instead of 6 scallions. This had little effect on the taste, but the green tops were not there to add color. She left out all of the parsley. That did change the taste of the soup, but it did not suffer. It was just different. She used 7 oz of Greek yogurt instead of 1 pint of plain yogurt. These are roughly equivalent and didn't change things much. She did not add the whole quart of buttermilk.  She only added about 1 1/2 pints of buttermilk because she thought the soup was already too thin. Her version was very good and was both refreshing and filling at the same time.

I changed a few things, also. My husband doesn't like onions, so I left out the scallions/onions altogether. However, I did add in all of the parsley. The parsley was pretty strongly flavored so it more than made up for the lack of the onion. In fact, I may add just a bit less next time I make it. It did add a nice light green color to the soup. I also did not add all of the buttermilk. I think that would have cut down on the cucumber taste too much and made the soup too thin.

My sister used her food processor to blend things and I used my blender. Both worked well.

I think this would be a fairly forgiving recipe to tweak with what you have or what you like.

I do know that I am going to make some again very soon. As soon as I get more cucumbers.

B is for Blueberries

Did you know that blueberries are the only naturally occurring blue food? You probably did. But did you know they were native to North America? I didn't, but I had never wondered about that before. Sometimes the world I live in is very limited. :)

We are very lucky that we get to pick from Uncle Billy's blueberry bushes every year. Over time he has carefully tended to them so he has several large, prolific ones. Blueberry season here starts at the end of June and goes for several weeks. During that time, we have blueberries for snacks, with our cereal, and some go into the freezer. However, my favorite way to eat them is in a pie mixed with sour cherries. I love a fruit pie.

I have also gone blueberry picking in Maine with Mary Ellen's family. We picked wild blueberries which were much smaller than the cultivated ones we find at Uncle Billy's house. Some of us were picking individual berries and others were using a blueberry rake which "grabs" the berries and leaves the stems and leaves. That was fun to use. I have also eaten wild blueberries while hiking. They were an especially welcome treat and a good excuse for me to get others to stop when I was tiring out before they were.

No discussion of picking blueberries in Maine would be complete without a mention of Wally's favorite book when he was little, Blueberries For Sal by Robert McCloskey. A favorite of mind, too. One reason is that I like to say, "kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk,"  when Sal drops berries into her bucket. :)

That's about it for today. See you tomorrow when I will switch from fruits to a vegetable. Or will I... 

A is for Apple

When children are learning the alphabet, the letter A is often featured with an apple. Did you ever wonder why a word that actually makes the sound of A (long A as I was taught) wasn't picked like ape? Oh, well. I guess it all works out because most kids eventually learn how to read.

But I digress. We're here today for me to ramble on about apples. Apples may be my favorite fruit. There's nothing better than a slightly tart, sweet, juicy apple.  If given a choice, I prefer my apples raw as opposed to cooked--unless, of course, they are cooked in a pie. 

In my apple world, life used to be simple. When I went to the grocery store to buy apples, my choices were red delicious, yellow delicious, and granny smith. Now it seems that there is a new kind every time I turn around. However, it's just not my imagination. There are over 7500 varieties of apples grown around the world and about 2500 of those are grown in the US. For many, many years, the red delicious apple was the most popular kind in the US. I never quite understood that because I thought they were tasteless. However, Uncle Billy grew red delicious apples for a while and I got to sample one right off the tree. It had a subtle sweet taste. Quite nice. Recently, the gala apple has overtaken the red delicious as the most popular variety in the US. The top five varieties are gala, red delicious, granny smith, fuji, and honey crisp.

When I was growing up, my apple world was simpler still. My father would pick up dropped apples that people would give him from their trees. He would bring home bushels of them that we would make into applesauce. Early harvest were his favorite variety with their tart taste. During the fall, we went through periods when my sister and I would have to make a canner load of applesauce every day after school until they were gone. 

Apples waiting to be made into apple butter at the Apple Harvest Festival
in the eastern panhandle of WV.

If we got apples from the store, we paid particular attention to golden delicious because they were discovered in West Virginia, not that far from where we lived. The golden delicious apple was found on the Mullins farm in Clay County and Mr. Mullin sold it to Stark Brothers who started marketing it in 1914. They called it golden delicious to market it with their red delicious variety. The golden delicious variety may have been derived from the golden grimes apple which was discovered in another part of West Virginia in 1832. West Virginia continues its apple tradition today with the eastern panhandle of the state being a large apple grower.

One of our old apple trees.

So what does my apple world look like these days? I have a gala apple most days. Gala is my apple of choice because of decent flavor and good prices. Unfortunately, even though we have two apple trees, they have not yielded more than an apple or two for various reasons, so we buy all of our apples. 

And as for what my apple world might look like in the future?  Last year we planted a small liberty apple tree that we hope will yield nicely for us in a few years.  

I think I'm about done with my apple ramblings. I will leave you with this one bit of apple trivia.

What was Johnny Appleseed's real name?

(John Chapman)

A to Z Blogging

Against my better judgement, I have decided to participate in the Blogging A to Z challenge this year. I have done it in the past and found it enjoyable because I often write about things that I might not have thought to write about during regular times.  That's some of the time. The rest of it, I get stressed trying to keep up with daily posting. I know, it's totally voluntary, and nothing bad will happen if I miss a day here or there, but when I commit to something, I like to follow through. So we'll see how it goes. I will either finish it totally as I have done other years, complaining along the way, or I will have personal growth and relax even when I miss a day of posting.

Many people have a theme when they do this, but I never have. However, this year I'm going to try a theme to see if that helps with posting. When I can't fall asleep, I play word games in my head often naming something for each letter of the alphabet--my version of counting sheep. My favorite category when I do this is Fruits and Vegetables. So that's what I've chosen. Join me each day, if you like, to see what I can come up with as I go through an alphabet of fruits and vegetables. 

See you again on April Fool's Day, otherwise known as The Beginning of the Blogging A to Z month.

This and That

I've been away for a while, so it's time for a check-in with a bit of this and that.

Spring is really here (and the calendar agrees). We have entered into the stage where something new is budding or blooming every day. Granted we could still have snow, and the last frost is not usually until the middle of May, but the ratio of cold to warm days is getting smaller.

Today was a warm but windy day, a day I spent outside digging in the dirt preparing beds for seeds and then planting them - but not before I had to chase more than one envelope of seeds around the yard.  I planted carrots, beets, peas, radishes, lettuce, and bunching onions using seeds that Miss Lander's shared with me. Among them, she gave me pelleted carrot seeds which are the greatest thing since sliced bread. I shouldn't have to do the extensive thinning that I usually have to do with carrots since these were big enough to control the spacing. I still have broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and carrots growing in the milk jugs. I think they are ready for transplanting and I will do that tomorrow. We'll see how they survive and that will be the true test to see if this method of cold starting seeds is as easy as it seems.

And speaking of things that are supposed to be easy, I have been painting the grout between the tiles in one of my bathrooms. The grout is still in good shape, but its white color has turned to brown over the years. I read several places about grout paint, and this is supposed to be the easiest job ever. It's not working out that way for me, however. The theory is that you paint the grout using a toothbrush and the paint sticks to the grout, but easily removes from the tile.  The bottle says to wipe as you go, and others say to wait a little. Well, I have tried various painting and wiping methods and I am getting uneven coverage at best. I've been doing a row of tile a day, so as to not kill my back and knees, and I am trying a different technique everytime to see if I can find the magic formula. So far it works best when I let it dry completely and scrape the extra paint off the tile. It is true that it sticks to the grout, but not to the tile--sort of. It is a very labor intensive job, but overall the floor does look better. 

In other news, Ward and I, both, got our first COVID vaccines on Monday. That experience brought a flood of emotions--a few tears of relief that there is an end in sight to the hypervigilance of the past year. (Vigilance will still be around, but hypervigilance-I hope not.) Then I had a few wild thoughts that I just drank the Kool-Aid. Do we really know what's in those vaccines? Granted that was my crazed mind that was taking center stage for a moment. All of that was followed by plans of what we may be able to comfortably do in a few months. Apparently, I'm not off the roller coaster of emotions of the last year yet.

Well, that's just a few things that have been keeping me busy. In another post, I will tell more. But for now, here are a few scenes from the yard.

There are still a few snowdrops blooming.

I have planted little pockets of crocus around the yard.
They are my favorite flower of early spring.

I have also planted daffodils in various places that are starting to bloom. I don't know if all of them will bloom this spring, however. They may need another year to mature.
(You may notice my milk jug planters behind the daffodil.)

The forsythia started to bloom a couple of days ago.

The birds are singing their hearts out and building nests.

Some of the lilacs have leaves budding.

Well, that's about it until next time...