Simple yet flavorful homestyle cucumber onion salad for a backyard barbecue.

Cuke & Onion Salad

By Sue Lau

Today is Palatable Pastime’s 4th birthday (Yes, my baby is 4 years old now!) I opened up the blog with one of  my favorite brunch recipes: Baked  Garlic Cheese Grits.

For today I am  posting  one of my favorite things to make in summer- salad. I like to keep at least one kind of  prepared salad in the fridge during  summer  at all times. And this cucumber salad is a variation on one  of many  I do. Just yesterday I made a corn and black bean salad with some  remnants of asparagus from my summer rolls (a few spears were nicely long! But they didn’t fit into the roll,  so I trimmed them and saved the  extra bits for salad). I also had grilled some corn, but it ended up being  too much food,  so I bagged up  the ears and kept those for salad too. It’s very easy  to cut off the kernels and mix into something.  I posted a bit about it on my Facebook page, since I won’t have time to get it into the blog. It’s a good idea to follow me  on Facebook if you don’t want to miss a  bite! —->>>>Palatable Pastime on Facebook 

I have generalized instructions for making this salad posted on there.

But back to today’s post. Cucumber salad is perhaps the  easiest and accessible salad to make for a bbq in the summertime. It is dirt cheap (often you get get the cukes 3/$1 or less) and has few ingredients, most of which  everyone probably already has.  So if  in face you get a call to a bbq and need to bring something, you can get this together in a few minutes and in the time you get ready, travel and arrive, the salad should pretty much be  perfect.

So no. You don’t have to pop in  to the market and grab the bachelor’s bag of chips or a tub of overpriced, who-know-when-this-was-made tub of deli potato salad on the way.

Save your time for playing footsie  with that Greek God or Goddess in your life, or as luck might have it in my case, try one more time to coax the kiddo into cleaning up her room before some random city official tries to condemn the house.

Fortunately for me,  I am now an empty nester,  and as I drive to  my daughter’s home with tub of cuke salad in hand, I am happy. The mess is not at my place, even though if excavated by archaeologists thousands of  years from now, they might find a section of wall with unremovable crayon marks (you try rubbing them out, you try scrubbing them out, and you still have *dark* ring-around-the-eye, and Wisk could care less…not even the abandoned Mr. Clean eraser on the floor…) hidden behind unexpected layers of paint. Childhood heiroglyphics. It’s a right of passage. You don’t get to  be an empty nester without it.

But there is  an inherent evilness that is yet to  come,  for any empty nester who becomes a grandparent,  watches with a silent wicked smile at the child who is now a parent, try to deal with these kind of first-world problems themselves.

#ourmotherswarnedus

“One day you’ll  have kids of your own and….” Suddenly you realize you have become your mother.

So I  will warn you about kids, and I  would be  errant in my duties if I did not warn you about a mandolin as well, which can make such easy work of slicing, but if you fail to  use the finger guard, it can be worse than the rooster from Cold Mountain, with “the devil in him, at you with his spurs….”, so unless you want Ruby Thewes to throw the flogging mandolin in the pot and make slicer soup of it, you’ll need to use that and keep your fingers  intact, so you can stand  around holding the floor down with a rake… 😉

Hopefully this all has happy endings, and we all love a good barbecue. with Memorial Day and Victoria Day upon us, the summer grilling season has officially begun.

Join me tomorrow as I continue with #BBQWeek with my recipe for Tandoori Chicken Tikka with Masala Grilled Corn. There’s a GIVEAWAY too, sponsored by Michigan Asparagus, so make sure you get entered into that one. Somebody’s gonna’ win it,  might as well be you. If you want to enter today, go to yesterday’s post and scroll down to the bottom, it’s all there—–>>>>>Grilled Hoisin Chicken and Asparagus Summer Rolls. The giveaway runs all week long.