Cucumbers

My poor husband has had the misfortune of having shared living space with not one but two extreme haters of cucumbers. Not simply the taste, but smell as well. He likes to tell the story of how his roommate once yelled up the stairs to their apartment from the floor below to ask if he was cutting cucumbers. I'm just as sensitive, I'm afraid.

Suddenly, the people who decide what everything from our dish soap to floor wax should smell like have decided that there's just something fresh and clean and wonderful to the acidic/decomposing smell of cucumber. You know, like a compost heap. No, lavender or rose or even the tried and true pine wasn't enough for these people-now everything has to smell like the inside of the truck my father delivered barrels of pickles in-without the benefit of garlic and dill.

I know what you're thinking-but really my aversion isn't from having grown up around pickles, as I rather like the way pickling spice overwhelms the smell of cucumber. No, don't blame the old man. If anyone should bear blame for my cucumber aversion, it is my mother-and a cold salad dish she called, Farmer's Chop Suey. Not that she'd ever been anywhere near a farm, unless you can count Hickory Farms.

For the uninitiated, Farmer's Chop Suey consists of chopped-up cucumbers, radishes, and scallions mixed with cottage cheese and sour cream. I suppose it could be good made with full-fat cottage cheese and sour cream-but that never happened at our house. Instead, the lower-fat cottage cheese would get watery and the whole thing would begin to separate by the time she plopped it down at the table like some culinary triumph. All that chopping and dicing, and stirring!

OK, so you're thinking, "One serving of that doesn't sound that bad", which is true. Unfortunately, we'd be eating it for days. This salad was usually served alongside her salmon patties which had precious little salmon in them but plenty of dry breadcrumbs and dried parsley. Sometimes the Farmer's Chop Suey worked best to soften the patties up a bit...so they could be swallowed.

Still, cucumbers I'm afraid are everywhere, stinking up every public and private space one enters these days. Like the spiced potpourris of the 80's and 90's, the crap is inescapable. It is so bad, that I opened a magazine last week only to be hit by the disgusting (and really, kind of unlikely) combination of lime, vetivier and cucumber coming off of a fragrance advertisement. I ripped the offending insert from the magazine and tossed it, but the scent lingers on the pages still-weeks after. I'll likely need to pitch the magazine.

Cucumber is a useless vegetable anyway, unless you pickle it in brine-and even that's questionable. It doesn't add anything to salads that I can tell and I'm sure I'm not the first person to have their mouth itch and burn after eating it. Why? Why cucumbers? Am I missing something that the whole rest of the world appreciates? Is there any actual good use for them?

I still remember my horror as a teenager after permitting my best friend to place slices of cucumbers on my eyelids to soothe puffiness (and really, at sixteen just how much eye puffiness do you have? Certainly not enough to require the application of raw vegetables to your face). It wasn't "soothing." It burned. Oh my God in heaven, it burned like a burning, burning burning piece of veg burning the delicate (albeit allegedly puffy) skin of my eyelids. People, let me share some wisdom-vegetables are for eating. You don't want to put that stuff of your face, let alone your eyes. Yeah, yeah, "natural" I get it, but in the words of that great American example of the ravages of LSD on a person, Grace Slick:

"Poison oak is a natural plant, why don't you put some in your food? Natural food makes you slow and stupid."
-a thought to which I can only add:
"And it doesn't belong on your eyes, in your dish soap, or floor cleaner.