Yes indeed, yet another cucumber salad. Well all right, so maybe I haven’t posted as many cucumber salads as I thought. I sure seem to make a lot of them though.
What can I say? I like cucumbers, their lack of any real flavor and nutrients is just so English. Like green rolling hills with clumps of trees in a verdant rustic beauty that is almost a national symbol in its own right.
You want to know that sad story about those perfect rolling hills and clumps of perfect trees? Most of them were designed to look that way.
Yes, designed. Capability Brown the “Great” Landscape artist of the eighteenth century went around England designing “Picturesque” spots, often of 10,000 acres or more. Every silly sod of an aristocrat with more money than brains (Which of course is most of them, it’s the inbreeding) decided that they had to have their lands landscaped by Brown because nature just can’t be trusted to get it right.
Thus hundreds of formal gardens, mazes and even wheat fields were turned into useless grass fields with random sheep and artistic "Natural" clumps of trees. They look pretty yes, but so does Selma Hayek; it doesn’t mean that she’s not a complete waste of oxygen.
Where but in an artificial landscape could perfectly melancholy weeping willows caress the rippling surface of a lake so irregular it has to be fake. Where bull rushes are found growing next to lily pads, without the annoyance of frogs and river rats. Rivers, streams and brooks were dammed and diverted so that they could meander over non native artificial rocks, to fill artificial pools surrounded by artificial mossy banks, under and artificial sky, OK so that was to come later, we can blame Paxton for that.
In some extreme cases such as at Eaton Hall, Blenheim Palace and Chatsworth House, entire villages were demolished to create an unobstructed view of perfectly picturesque artificial nature. They let the people out before they demolished them of course…well most of the time. Peasants can be so inconvenient at times. This was the reason for the invention of the Ha-ha. A ha-ha is like a dry moat, a ditch one side (The side facing away from the toothy aristocrats) was faced with a stone wall, the other was sloping grass, the tops of these two sides should be parallel so that when one looks across your sweeping landscaped acres you can’t actually see it, (At least from the house or summer pavilion or anywhere that a rich person might go.). These stopped inconvenient peasants, cows and sheep from wandering up from the farther pastures and being excessively quaint at the gentry. This is understandable; if you have ever been nose to nose with a cow you will know just how un-picturesquely rural they are at close quarters. The same thing applies to the peasants, except peasants don’t give milk, and you can’t eat them. Except in special circumstances on both counts, neither of which I am going to go into right now because it is my bedtime and I don’t need peasants or cows to disturb my dreamscape.
Well enough about peasants here is the cucumber salad recipe that goes with the satay recipe to follow.
Ingredients:
2 Cucumbers
3 Tablespoons of rice vinegar
2 Tablespoons Brown sugar
1 or 2 Green onions chopped
Dash of cayenne pepper or paprika (Optional)
Method:
Slice cucumbers paper thin, I mean paper thin, use a mandolin or a food processor, and you should be able to read newsprint through the slice of cucumber. Toss with the rice vinegar and the brown sugar. Let stand 20 minutes before serving. Sprinkle with cayenne pepper or paprika if desired. Serves 4-6
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