Quick. What helps you lose weight, lower blood pressure, keep you hydrated, shares some DNA with melons and squashes, contains enough vitamin K and antioxidants for the week, ranks low in calories but high in nutrients?
Clue: It ain’t kale.
Say good-bye to kale.
Today’s super food is the cucumber.
And what a cucumber season it’s been. Hail to the honey bees and the bumblebees. They are the pollinators. They are the vehicles, the essential workers, the carriers that make the whole thing happen, even though each cucumber plant contains both male and female parts.
"Oh, no," my artist/farmer friend Susan said from her country kitchen when I walked back with a new batch I unearthed when I started weeding her garden. "More cucumbers."
"And there are more yellow blossoms," I reported, "which means there will be more to come."
Not what she wanted to hear. I went out to weed the carrots, the beans, the eggplant. She thought the cucumbers were finito. Wrong. They were tucked under the vines on the ground, hidden in the vines on the fence. They were still a’comin’. Hello white gazpacho. Hello mango-cucumber salsa. Hello sesame-ginger cucumber salad. Hello watermelon-cucumber salad. Hello regular old cucumber-tomato salad. Too many cucumbers? Try baking, roasting, sauteeing, throwing them in stir-fry or blending. They can take it all.
I should have known it was going to be a good cucumber season when a niece down the street brought over several jars of her pickled cukes – sweet, sour, dill and bread-and-butter. And that was in May.
When I left the farm known as Green Acres, Susan managed to sneak in eight more big ones – as well as a dozen fresh eggs and jars of lemon-fig jam, spicy tomato focaccia topping, tomato sauce, pickled beans and peach jam.
COVID isolation has been very, very good for gardeners.
Me and cucumbers? Not so much. Growing them just seemed so, well, pedestrian, but now I’m a convert. Next year for sure. Today I take all I can get.
"Thanks for doing pet duty," I said to a neighbor who fed our chickens and cats after I tended her garden – and cucumbers — when she left town.
"Don’t suppose you want any cuckes, eh?" I hinted, thinking that might be a nice thank you gift since, at her suggestion, I helped myself to a bunch of hers when she was out of town, all the while thinking she might be tired, very tired, of them.
"We do!" she said. Her vines rebelled when the temperature climbed. Now they’re back putting on blooms but they’re not there yet. "We’re out."
Dan Dakota from Coastal Plains Farms in Bloomingdale had a similar conundrum – too many cucumbers. Dakota, who moved to Savannah years ago with his wife Janet from South Dakota, started his operation two years ago. But this year he produced so many cucumbers and tomatoes on his hydroponic farm he didn’t know what to do with them. His daughter Leighann Pilkington did. Through a friend of a friend of a friend, Leighann got in touch with Ben Austin. Ben is connected to Emmaus House, which is tied in with the United Ministries of Savannah at Christ Church. Help, she said, in so many words. So Ben did. He drove out to the Pine Barren Road farm. Leighann and her father loaded him up with 200 pounds of cucumbers and hundreds of pounds of beefsteak heritage tomatoes.
Then Ben drove them to Emmaus House, a nonprofit organization associated with Christ Church focused on feeding the hungry. That’s where Brandi Kelsey, the soup kitchen’s unflappable executive chef since November, would take over. That’s where she would work her magic, all the while keeping her usual composure and staying "cool as a cucumber," a well-worn line from a 1732 poem by Englishman John Gay. This simile references the fact that even in hot weather the inside temperature of a cucumber is usually about 20 degrees cooler than the outside air. Thank you, John Gay. Thank you, Ben, Brandi and the folks at Coastal Plains Farm.
Contact Jane Fishman at gofish5@earthlink.net or call 912-484-3045.
August 16, 2020 at 04:23PM
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JANE FISHMAN: Stay cool as a cucumber in Savannah - Savannah Morning News
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