Lemon Cucumber Caprese Salad: Size Doesn't Matter

The farmers market is always a place of discovery for me. Vegetables I’ve never seen before, mutant fruit, a curmudgeonly lady playing the didgeridoo – anything you can think of, I’ve encountered it at the Santa Barbara farmers market. Well, not anything you can think of. Be reasonable.

My newest discovery came before a dinner date with my friend Sasha. We were perusing the market for ingredients to make a tasty meal when we found what looked like a cross between a summer squash and a pumpkin.

Lemon cucumbers at the Milliken Farm stand

Turns out, these little nuggets are neither of the above: they’re cucumbers! Lemon cucumbers, to be exact. Despite what their name suggests, lemon cucumbers are not the creation of a mad scientist who wondered what would happen if a lemon and a cucumber had a mutant baby. They’re just stout, yellow cucumbers that are kind of shaped like a lemon and grow during the summer.

Lemon cucumbers have a sweeter flavor than regular cucumbers, but have the same crisp texture. They’re also called apple cucumbers, since some people apparently have trouble distinguishing between lemons and apples.

The Milliken Farm stand was selling them for $2.50 a pound, so I bought a few. I’ve been feeling kind of anti-traditional-salad lately, but I couldn’t think of another way to use these midget cukes in a meal.

Then I saw the fresh mozzarella at the Spring Hill Jersey Cheese stand. They only had one package of it left, so I snatched it up quicker than you can say “mozzarella-ella-ella-ey-ey-ey.” I was going Caprese style on these cukes.

Caprese salad is usually just sliced tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and basil drizzled with balsamic dressing and olive oil. It’s a refreshing, filling twist on a traditional salad and I basically subsist on it whenever I’m pretending to be in Italy.

So Sasha and I trekked home from the market and got to work slicing up fresh heirloom tomatoes, the Spring Hill mozzarella cheese, and the Lilliputian cucumbers:

The fresh ingredients

I layered the slices with basil from my mason jar herb garden and drizzled some balsamic vinegar and olive oil on top:

Yum! The cucumbers added a crunchy texture to the traditional Caprese salad. The difference in flavor from regular old cucumbers was just barely noticeable. So when it comes to cucumbers, does size matter? It depends on what you’re going to do with that cucumber.

I am assuming you’re going to put it in a salad, so the answer is nope! Size doesn’t matter. These pocket-sized little guys do the job just as well as their more common green cousins.

Omelet Fail: Asparagus and White Cheddar Scramble

People sometimes say, “You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.” I think that’s just another way of saying sometimes you have to get through tricky and/or nasty things in order to accomplish something good. I tried to keep this in mind as I failed to make an omelet yesterday; instead, I just told myself I was making a very successful scramble.

At first I thought it was because I’m out of practice, but now it’s time to admit that I am just not any good at making omelets. First of all, there’s no way I’m cracking eggs without getting some shell in the mix. That’s a given. I usually spend about a minute and a half trying to fish out the bits of shell before coming to terms with the idea of eating eggshells.

Once I’ve compiled the omelet in the pan, flipping it is another hurdle. Assuming I’ve greased the pan enough (which is a generous assumption), it’s unlikely that I’m going to get enough leverage with the spatula and choose just the ride midpoint so that the omelet looks… well, like an omelet instead of like a mess.

Making a sad-looking omelet is a depressing experience, so I’ve learned to avoid it by opting to make scrambles instead. Because what is a scramble if not a failed omelet? Set your sights low, that’s what I always say.

Yesterday I decided to use a bunch of fresh, local ingredients to make a delicious scramble. Here’s what I used:

Asparagus and White Cheddar Scramble

3 eggs
3 tbsp milk
3 asparagus stalks, chopped
handful raw white cheddar cheese
pinch of salt

I used Lily’s free-range, organic eggs from Fillmore, California (distance from me: 52 miles). Lily’s eggs is a company run by Robert Tropper and Diana Tuomey, who value the happiness of their chickens and treat them like pets. The chickens to run around their farm, snacking on earthworms, wheat sprouts, soybeans, and corn. Oh! And not being killed, since the farm is purely for egg production.

The asparagus came from Melendez Farm in Santa Maria, California (distance from me: 63.5 miles). Luis Melendez has been farming at this location for over twenty-four years. He and his sons, Hector, Mario, and Mike, grow all sorts of different vegetables on their twenty-five acres.

The raw white cheddar cheese, which has become a favorite of mine, was from Spring Hill Jersey Cheese. I wrote a post about Spring Hill a few weeks back.

After mixing the eggs (and, who am I kidding, some shards of eggshell) with the milk, I poured them into a large frying pan over a low flame. It’s important to make a scramble over low heat in order to cook all the eggs evenly. If you think I didn’t learn that the hard way, you don’t know me at all.

When the eggs started to congeal, I added the chopped asparagus and cheddar cheese and a pinch of salt. I mixed the scramble by kind of folding it over itself, over and over again. It was much easier to deal with than flipping an omelet would have been, and I think I pulled it off nicely.

I served it (to myself) with a roll of rustic bread from Solvang Pie Company (distance from me: 33.2 miles). This rustic bread was one of my staples when I was a vegan – it’s made without eggs or whey.

I know it sounds cliché, but here goes: using fresh, organic ingredients makes a huge difference in the taste of a meal. It can turn a boring old failed omelet into a tasty scramble. So if you must crack a few eggs to make an omelet (and yes, you must), make sure they’re free-range, organic eggs.

Grilled White Cheddar with Strawberry, Avocado, and Balsamic

One of the best things about Santa Barbara is that we have a farmers market almost every day. Now that I’m making a point of eating locally, I have to be careful about how much money I spend on food. I am always a bit anxious about the price tags at farmers markets, but it’s worth it to me to support local growers.

Spending a little extra on groceries means I’ll have to cut back in other areas of my life, like haircuts (hello, Supercuts!) and clothes. Try not to be too jealous of my resourcefulness when you see that I’ve sewn the legs back onto my jean shorts come winter.

Last week I grabbed one of the reusable bags that have been piling up in a corner of my kitchen and headed to the market with my friend Sasha. When I got back, I wanted to eat everything I’d purchased right away. So I got it into my head to make a pretty weird sandwich. Here’s what I used:


Grilled White Cheddar with Strawberry, Avocado, and Balsamic

2 slices whole grain bread
1 large strawberry, sliced
2 tsp slivered almonds
1/4 avocado, sliced
1 handful fresh baby spinach
2 slices raw white cheddar cheese
1/2 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp Earth Balance

I used strawberries from John Givens Farm in Goleta (distance from me: 9 miles). John Givens started his farm in 1980 with just one acre of land; now it’s 180 acres. They grow a ton of different crops, from cabbage to broccoli to peas. I bought a crate of strawberries for $4 and snacked on one of them while I perused the rest of the market. Seriously, I snacked on one strawberry. It was enormous.

Obviously, any kind of cheese will do in a grilled cheese sandwich. But I found that white cheddar was tasty when combined with the sweetness of the strawberries. I used raw white cheddar from Spring Hill Jersey Cheese in Petaluma (distance from me: 360 miles). This farm turned out to be not as close to me as I would have liked; when the man operating the stand told me they make the cheese in Petaluma, I nodded and pretended I knew where Petaluma was. According to Google Maps, it would take me six hours to drive there… but I guess I can still count it as “local,” since this cheese is so tasty that I might just make the drive on my own.

Spring Hill Jersey Cheese is “estate produced,” meaning the cheese is manufactured in a single location. The milk comes from a herd of 400 pasture-grazed Jersey cows, and it’s made into cheese on the premises. My white cheddar is raw, or unpasteurized, so it contains a lot of healthy enzymes. So they tell me. Truthfully, I wouldn’t know an enzyme from my elbow.

To make the sandwich, I piled all the ingredients except for the balsamic vinegar onto the bread and spread some Earth Balance on each side. Then I grilled it for about two minutes. Flipping the sandwich was quite tricky – I have to admit, I lost a strawberry slice or two – but once the cheese melted, it was a lot more manageable.

After grilling each side, I removed the sandwich and poured the balsamic vinegar into the hot pan. I quickly put the sandwich back into the pan on top of it, and the balsamic vinegar absorbed right up into the toast. Yum.