Refreshingly different flavor in cucumber salad.

Cucumber Salad with Lovage and Gorgonzola
by Sue Lau | Palatable Pastime
5.8.14

You won’t mind if I kvetch, I hope about how tired I get of eating the same old cucumber salads. Do you? It seems like an endless vacillation between Danish cucumbers in sour cream and cucumbers in Sesame vinaigrette or something close.

I was in the mood for something different. ~AND~ I wanted to use some of the lovage growing in my herb garden. Lovage, if you haven’t had it, is a leafy herb quite a lot like parsley, except that its flavor has lots of hints of celery.

I know most markets don’t sell it so unless you are lucky or grow your own, you might be out of luck. Or are you? I think a good substitute for a leafy herb that tastes like celery would be the fresh leaves from the stalk of your celery. I often save those with other vegetable scraps to make vegetable stock, but they do nicely chopped up in salads.

For other flavors in the salad, I thought about celery and the coolness of the cucumbers and how I usually enjoy those flavors, which in my case is often celery with spicy grilled Buffalo chicken wings. And what luck that I happened to have a very nice chunk of gorgonzola cheese in the fridge! So I knew that was going in. The rest I added some chopped dill and also a bit of celery, some chopped scallion and sliced zucchini to give more depth of flavor and a different texture to the salad.

It works out very nicely! I think this would be great served with Buffalo chicken wings instead of the usual celery sticks and blue cheese. Or if you like, something fruity, like grapes or strawberries on the side will really make this salad pop.

I do hope you enjoy it!

~Sue

You might also like:

Buffalo Potato Salad

Summery Cottage Cheese Salad

Buffalo Chicken Salad

Can’t Find a Recipe? | Help
Recipe Index A-M | Recipe Index N-Z | Home