Cooking Light (June 2013)
Cucumber salads come in a number of forms.
There's the incredibly bracing sort, so tart from vinegar and acid that your face puckers a bit.
There's the cucumber salad that pits bracing against sweet in an epic battle to see if it will first pucker your face or rot your teeth (kind of our favorite, if we're choosing).
And there's the bland, the watery, the "is there any dressing on this or did you just serve me a bowl of sliced cucumbers?" salad.
We picked up a bunch of cucumbers at the farmers market recently, and while trying to figure out what to do with them, we ran across this recipe in Cooking Light. We've never featured a cucumber salad here on the blog, so we gave it a shot. There's nothing out of the ordinary about this recipe: sliced cucumbers and green and red peppers get tossed with oil, white wine, lemon juice, sugar, salt and pepper, as well as some herbs. It's a pretty basic take on the dish.
But here's the thing about this cucumber salad -- we find it to be perfectly balanced. It's not too sweet, not too tart. The dressing doesn't overpower the vegetables. There's no secret, star ingredient smuggled into the mix to set your taste buds on fire. It's a standard, very good, absolutely ordinary cucumber salad. And we loved it for that.
Continue reading "In Praise of Milquetoast: Cucumber Salad" »









