“To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” Mahatma Gandhi

Poor cucumbers. They’re mindlessly tossed on salads and thrown on sad veggie trays, when they’re capable of so much more. Let’s do our cucumbers a solid and help them reach their full flavorful potential!

Delicious cucumber dishes start with the freshest and ripest cucumbers, straight from the garden. This year I grew a few plants of baby and pickling cucumbers, but any variety can be used for these recipes. Regular cucumbers should be picked when they are about seven to nine inches long. For pickling varieties, pick when the cucumbers are smaller, about three to four inches long. They should be firm and a gorgeous dark green color. Don’t them grow too big, or they’ll be flavorless and full of seeds. This time of year, be sure to check your cukes everyday, even twice a day. They grow crazy fast!

Before we get into the recipes, let me say this week’s blog was the perfect reminder that gardening and cooking are constant lessons. I’m not a trained chef and don’t have a degree in horticulture. I’m completely self-taught, so screwing up and adjusting is a common occurrence. Just when you think you have the hang of it, something goes wrong and makes you question if any of this is even worth the effort. I promise you, it’s worth it! Embrace the failures and keep trying. It took countless batches to get my pickles right. Oh, and my cucumber plants are dying. All of them. I’ve tended to them perfectly (I thought) all season and they’re still doing horrible (lack of pollination, I’ve concluded after much research). Thank God my Mom is a cucumber growing queen and provided most of the cukes for cooking this week.