In the circles that I frequent, I'm known for having a bit of culinary know-how. I'm no chef, but on most nights at our house, we eat rather well. This does not include those occasional rough days when my rowdy son has unexpectedly woken up in the middle of the night, caterwauling to be freed from the confines of his claustrophobic crib. I stumble down the stairs, blind and half asleep, bouncing off the walls, and nearly falling flat on my face when I finally reach the landing. You know how your poor body thinks there is just one more step to go and then your leg is stopped short by the floor and your hip gets unexpectedly jammed into your spine and the momentum of the rest of your body sends you toppling onto your face? Now fully alert and awake, you pick yourself up, briefly check for broken bones, and race to grab the wailing babe before he wakes the entire household and three neighboring residences. As soon as he hits your arms, he passes out.
You precariously position yourself on the edge of his oxymoronic "big boy" bed and snuggle next to him for a few minutes until you think he is sound asleep. You try to put him back in the crib and he wakes up. You repeat this ritual seven times before finally giving up, realizing that you are probably not going to have the pleasure of returning to the spacious comfort of your own bed on this particular evening. After accepting this grim reality, you finally start to drift off to sleep, until your sweet dreaming toddler, with his angelic face and head of tousled curls, starts rhythmically kicking you in the face. You would reposition yourself to avoid constant contact with his pulsating, pint-sized piggie, but you are already teetering dangerously on the edge of his minuscule mattress. The only thing left to do is resign yourself to simply staying put and suffering the consequences. After having one of those nights, and thank the lord they are rare, I morph into a dinner time zombie, lurching around the kitchen, searching aimlessly for some kind of nourishment for my clearly crabby self and my super starving family. I consider myself successful if I am able to properly prepare a package of hot dogs without setting the kitchen ablaze.
Luckily, as my sweet son grows older, this kind of suppertime scenario is growing less and less common. In fact, on most days, I am proud to say that we enjoy a wide variety of tasty cuisine, lovingly prepared by my hands. Unfortunately, not every dish is a success. When you're willing to take risks and try new things in the kitchen, you're bound to come across a few spectacular failures. It happens to every chef from time to time but some of those failures happen to be more epic than others. Some of those failures are seared into the taste buds of your unlucky food testers, the mere mention of which can still make them gag. Maybe as an adult, I have become a bit less willing to experiment in the kitchen, but I have never been able to successfully gross out my table mates as effectively as that steamy summer of my youth when I served up a big batch of cucumber ice cream. No, that is not a typographical error, nor am I the hapless victim of autocorrect. You read that right the first time...cucumber ice cream. Never heard of that innovative flavor combination before? Perhaps you simply aren't well traveled. Or perhaps there is a reason you don't see this menu item listed at every Dip and Scoop from here to Poughkeepsie. It was supposed to be cool, creamy and refreshing, instead it turned out green, gritty and disgusting.
You may be wondering how I came up with this particular concoction. Trust me, it was not an invention of my own design. I enjoy cooking but I'm not much for experimenting in the kitchen. I'm more of a stick to the recipe kind of gal. I can trace this back to the early days of my culinary training. When people ask me where I learned to cook, I always tell them that I learned at the heels of my mother and grandmother. I should actually say under the heels, as the kitchen could be a dangerous place for little tots like me. Despite the inherent danger of hot bubbling pots, fast flying cutlery, and getting a little crack with a wooden spoon for extreme indiscretions like double dipping the tasting spoon, it was a place I loved to be. All the hours and hours of observing and helping would eventually pay off.
Usually people make some sort of comment about never having the time to sit down with family members to learn the art of cooking. Growing up smack in the middle of rural America, time was one thing that I was not short on. I had hours and hours of long summer days with nothing to do but stare out the window at the cornfield next door. My mom encouraged my sister and I to dabble in the culinary arts, probably so we would stop driving her crazy by incessantly repeating the following phrase, "Mooooommm, I'm so bored. There's nothing to do." Which is how I found myself at a very young age standing on a kitchen chair with a bowl, a spoon, and a big, fat recipe book, learning how to cook. Truth be told, in my early years, I spent a lot more time baking then cooking. Inevitably as you're learning to hone your cooking skills, you're bound to have a failure or two. Better to have a botched dessert than an entire meal that was completely inedible. My mom was pretty free with what she allowed us to bake. There were really only two rules. First, you had to clean up after yourself. I readily admit that this was not my particular forte. Second, it was highly frowned upon if you wasted ingredients, which meant if you tried something new, it had better turn out, or you would run the risk of receiving mom's rarely given, but utterly devastating, frowny face of disapproval.
Luckily, the majority of our desserts turned out to be delightful. I mean my mom had carefully taught us all the basics of pastry, practically before we were able to walk, so our successes weren't particularly surprising. Besides, she was always willing to help guide us along whenever we found ourselves struggling with some sugary sweet snafu. To help avert kitchen disasters, early on in our culinary endeavors, all recipes had to be approved by our mom before we were permitted to touch a single measuring spoon. As we got older, and developed a more solid set of cooking and baking knowledge, we were given a much greater amount of freedom in the recipe selection department. A move that I am sure my mother deeply regretted after wrapping her lips around one tiny obligatory spoonful of bright green, creamy cucumber goodness.
You may be wondering exactly how I arrived at cucumber ice cream. It was more of a choice by elimination than anything else. Nowadays, the modern ice cream maker, which includes a special metal bowl that you store in your freezer until you are ready to whip up a batch of some delectable dairy dessert, is readily available. Back then, you still had the old hand-crank machines that required amazing arm strength and ten tons of rock salt. These old fashioned ice cream making contraptions were often found neglected in some forgotten corner of the garage, covered in a hefty layer of dust. By summer, rock salt was often hard to come by in those parts, as the winters were long and blustery. Also, with dad at work, arm strength was at a premium as well. In a rare, but smashing thrift store find, my brother got his hands on a slightly used modern ice cream machine made by the Donvier company. Unlike today's electric machines of a similar design, it was hand cranked and it was really small. Despite its limitations, it still allowed us to experiment with all sorts of homemade frozen confections that you couldn't easily get your hands on in the average grocery store, including the surprisingly unpopular flavor, cucumber.
In the heat of July, I began to specialize in small artisan batches of peach ice cream. It was delicious, creamy, chock full of juicy fruit at the peak of freshness and it was met with rave reviews. One of the drawbacks of living and dining in a significantly rural locale is the overall accessibility of important ingredients. Before beginning any culinary adventure, it was essential to verify that you had all items called for by the recipe or that you were able to create them through handy substitutions should the need arise. With the nearest grocery store being almost a half an hour away, there was no option of quickly running to the store for one or two missing items. Baking choices were often made based solely on the availability of the proper ingredients. Should I make chocolate chip or peanut butter cookies? I feel like chocolate chip today. Let's run down the ingredient list. Baking powder? Check. Flour? Check. Butter? Check. Chocolate Morsels? Negative. Okay then. Peanut butter cookies it is.
One sweltering summer afternoon, I had a hankering for ice cream. I sauntered over to the fridge in search of the necessary ingredients. It looked like we happened to have just about everything I needed, so I began to whip up a batch of my world famous peach ice cream. As I was nonchalantly tossing the essentials into the blender, I realized that unfortunately some fruit bandit in our household had eaten all of the peaches except for one lonely old bruised one left rolling around in the crisper. I was already six ingredients in and I didn't want to receive the devastating frowny face of disapproval from my mom. I had two counts against me. Not checking to make sure I had all the ingredients before I started cooking and possibly wasting an entire batch of ice cream.
Now, I had several options here. First, I could call the neighbor to see if she had any extra peaches lying around. Negative. Second, I could try to adjust the recipe to something without fruit like vanilla or chocolate. In a decision, I would later regret, I thought this option was simply too plain and boring. Third, I could make a savvy substitution. Unfortunately, we were clean out of fruit. There was not a single piece of the sweet stuff anywhere in the whole house. I was perusing a recipe book in a panicky fashion, when my eyes landed on the words cucumber ice cream. In a quick comparison with the award winning peach, it became apparent that both recipes shared a similar ratio of ingredients. It also just so happened that our garden had produced a bumper crop of cukes that summer. I grabbed my trusty vegetable peeler and set to work. Although I had some initial misgivings about the combination of ice cream and cucumbers, it was printed in a recipe book so someone had to think it was tasty, right?
I'm still not sure who exactly might enjoy this dairy disaster. Certainly, no one in my household was a fan of it, not even me. The fact that it was bright green did little to prepare your palate for the vicious assault it was about to undertake. You may be wondering why anyone would ever put even one spoonful of this crummy cucumber concoction to their lips. It had to do with the one spoonful rule. You see in my house, it was a requirement that you eat one spoonful of everything offered at the table. You were not allowed to say no thank you, I don't care for any of that. The philosophy behind this movement was that over time, your taste buds change and you may end up liking something you previously found disgusting. Sometimes, it was true and sometimes it wasn't, but those were the rules. Our parents wanted us to grow up and be willing to try new things instead of just sticking to the same old safe standards day after day.
As a child, I never really enjoyed cheesecake. My great aunt lived next door to a sweet, older lady named Mrs. Pochaton. I believe that she was of either Polish or Slovakian descent, but I have no idea how to actually spell her last name. However, I do know that it was pronounced pock-uh-tawn. Anyway, anytime this lovely woman heard that we were coming to town, she would prepare her signature cheesecake especially for us. Everyone raved about how delicious it was except my aunt. I think she was secretly peeved that someone besides her was attempting to spoil us with baked goods. She probably felt like spitting in her neighbor's cheesecake, but instead she was always sweet and cordial knowing that while cheesecake may not have been her thing, she still had the corner on the cream puff market. Anyway, I always had to try one tiny bite of this special cheesecake, although I myself deeply preferred my aunt's cream puffs to the savory, sweet spoonful of thick, cloying creaminess that I always struggled to swallow. Eventually though, I actually grew to like cheesecake, although this realization happened long after both my dear aunt and her sweet neighbor had passed on. This particular discovery can probably be credited to the one spoonful rule. Without it, I may have never dabbled in cheesecake again.
On the other hand, coleslaw has been an unwavering item on my do not eat list for nearly three decades. No matter how many spoonfuls I try, and no matter how many recipes I am presented with, my opinion of it remains perpetually unchanged. Even if you try to jazz it up with some raisins, a tradition handed down from my grandmother, I still find it utterly revolting. My sister's arch nemesis at the dinner table was the mixed vegetable. For years, she was forced to gag down a teaspoon of those dastardly devils every time they made a guest appearance at our kitchen table. The only person who received a special dispensation from the one spoonful rule was my older brother, who happened to be allergic to milk. Mercifully for all involved, he got a free pass from all things dairy.
This is why I can say with confidence that only four our of five people in my household found my presentation of cucumber ice cream to be positively putrid. The fifth taste tester abstained due to lactose intolerance. It was probably one of the few times my brother was pleased by the fact that he was unable to digest dairy. The rest of us suffered our spoonful in silence. It was actually my second spoonful of the gross green stuff. Like all chefs worth their salt, I had tasted it before serving it. I knew it was bad but I had hoped by some miraculous turn of events, the flavor would mellow a bit by the time dinner was finished. I assure you it did not. Forget the one spoonful rule and the frowny face of disapproval, that concoction should have received a one-way ticket to the compost pile. It was the one day when my parents actually regretted instilling the one spoonful rule. I could consider it paybacks for all that nasty coleslaw that I was forced to ingest against my will, but despite my disdain for coleslaw, I would have never purposely sought out such a cruel form of revenge as cucumber ice cream.
This is why I do not typically dabble in adjusting or tweaking recipes. I follow them as written and I prefer that they come from a trusted source on the internet that includes loads of rave reviews. Also, if they don't sound appealing to begin with, I have no problem avoiding them altogether. Despite the fact that I have had numerous culinary successes since the great cucumber ice cream debacle of 1987, no one is able to let it go. Perhaps it is the remaining bitterness of sweet cream and crunchy cucumber that still lingers on their lips. No matter how many dessert masterpieces I present, they still can't help bringing it up. Remember the time you made cucumber ice cream? Yes, I do. How could I possibly ever forget the greatest culinary disaster of my entire cooking career? Should anyone ever suggest to you that combining cucumbers with ice cream is actually a good idea, in the wise words of Nancy Reagan, "Just Say No." I for one have learned my lesson. Even during one of my most miserable mommy moments, when I am so bleary-eyed from lack of sleep that I am struggling to decipher the cooking directions printed on the back of a sack of frozen peas, I solemnly promise to never, ever again attempt to combine sweet cream and cucumbers into some kind of frosty frozen dessert. I can say with 100% certainty that cucumbers make a lousy fruit substitute.
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