Mom’s Super-Quick Cucumber Salad

Stephen and I went to Costco the other day—my parents gave us a membership as an anniversary present last year, and it’s expiring this week. We didn’t exactly make the most of our membership (this was only our second trip, including the one when we activated it), but I thought it would be a good idea to do one final binge. Who knows, after junior arrives in September maybe we’ll rejoin—the diaper prices are killer.

As you probably know, Costco’s got a rep for lowlowlow prices, but only if you buy in large quantities. This is why we haven’t gone very often—we’re just two people! My parents are in the same boat, but they’re not the type to let a little thing like circumstance get in the way of bargain shopping. Their solution: they’ve turned my brothers’ old bedroom (not to mention mine) into a kind of storage facility. There’s enough coffee, cereal, and snack foods stacked in there to last through the next ice age. Seriously, if Homeland Security ever tells us to seal ourselves in with duct tape until further notice, my folks will be good to go. Since every child’s fear is to turn into her parents, Stephen and I thought long and hard about each purchase while trawling Costco’s aisles, limiting ourselves to things we know for sure we’ll use, and in quantity. Brita filters, Chock Full o’Nuts coffee, toilet paper. Y’know, basics. But we also picked up some English cucumbers—they were shrinkwrapped together, three for three dollars. Can’t beat that price! Along with that we got a six-pack of colored peppers, a ginormous package of grape tomatoes, and a full pound of organic mesclun, thinking we’d just eat a lot of salad. Well, we finished off the peppers and the tomatoes last night with some chicken sausage and the greens are about half gone, but as of this morning we still had two-and-a-third cukes left, and they were starting to feel soft. Perfect for cucumber salad!

This is a recipe my mom’s been making since I was a kid. For our wedding, which was a Sunday afternoon buffet, we had the caterer prepare one recipe from each of our families, and this was mine. It’s really bright tasting, refreshing in warm weather, fat-free, and about the simplest thing going. When my mom makes it for family gatherings, she'll do a double or triple recipe. All this means it's perfect for a Memorial Day barbecue, come to think of it… if only we were having one! Instead, we’ll just feast on cucumber salad for the next day or two, and reflect upon our bargains.

Cucumber Salad
Serves 6-8

6 cucumbers (or 2-3 English “burpless” ones)
1 t. salt
1 large onion
2 T. sugar
1 t. black pepper
2 T. chopped dill
1 T. water
½ cup rice vinegar

Slice cucumbers (with skin) as thinly as possible. Sprinkle with salt, mix, and place in a colander. Cover cukes with a plate and a weight to extract the liquid, and leave it to do its thing.

Halve and very thinly slice the onion. Put the onions in a small bowl with ice water, to soak out the sharpness. After at least an hour, drain the cucumbers and the onions. Mix the remaining ingredients, pour over the cucumbers, and marinate 15 minutes to overnight (overnight is much tastier).

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Fish for Non-Fish Eaters

Stephen hates fish. He’ll eat seafood—shrimp and lobster rolls, mainly—but since I grew up kosher that’s not in my vernacular and I have no interest in learning about it. (Admit it: doesn’t most shellfish just look like some variety of underwater insect? Have you ever looked at a crawfish? At least with bacon you can tell it’s good because it smells so damn intoxicating.) So this has been a bit of a problem for us—between his cholesterol issues and my disinterest in most red meat, our flesh-based protein choices are limited to chicken cutlets, chicken parts, and chicken sausages. Oh, and let’s not forget turkey. Ages ago Stephen’s mom suggested that I try cooking tilapia—she thought its extreme mildness might fly—but I’d already attempted roast cod (so mild, so yummy, and so easy) and it didn’t go over well.

And then, on Tuesday night, we went out to celebrate our 2nd wedding anniversary (awwww)… Since I don’t get to eat fish at home I try to order it whenever we go out; this time it was Tilapia in Acqua Pazza—“crazy water,” which basically translates into a fresh tomato sauce. The flavor was so clean and so unobtrusive, I suggested that Stephen should try a bite. To his credit he did, and actually said this was something he’d eat! My heart soared. Fish would be welcome in our home again! But I didn’t hurry out to buy any. It’s best not to rush these things, don’t you think?

And then, on Thursday (see, I waited two days), I went to the new Brooklyn Fairway in Red Hook, which had opened just the day before. What a store, people! It’s ginormous, first of all, with spacious aisles and stupendously helpful staff. Seriously, whoever’s in charge of training there deserves a medal—every time I asked someone for help I not only got a smile, I got an escort to the item I was seeking. Friendly hordes of workers awaited behind every counter; at midday there was no waiting for the deli, or the butcher, or the bakery. The only place I saw a line was the cheese counter, and since we all know how much I hate that stuff it didn’t bother me one bit. And the olive bar! Sigh. I picked up some Gaetas brined with lemon rind and a small vat of gorgeous, freshly marinated artichoke hearts. My only complaint about the experience: the traffic on the BQE coming home.

So, anyway. I’m at Fairway, and there’s a gleaming new fish counter, overflowing with gleaming piles of iced fish. I’ve never been particularly confident in my ability to spot the best-quality fish, but I figured that given a) Fairway’s good reputation in general and b) the fact that the store was only open two days, the odds were in my favor that the tilapia was fresh. Mind you, I hadn’t planned this—it was just so pretty, all shiny and new and not-fishy-smelling. Smiling to myself, I bought two fillets.

It’s been a while since I last cooked fish, and I really wanted to find a preparation that Stephen would appreciate. I figured this was my last shot; if he didn’t like it, I probably wouldn’t be buying fish again for a very long time. It occurred to me that my mistake with the roast cod was in the lack of sauce—in order for a simple roast anything to work, you have to like the basic flavor of the main ingredient…duh. While Stephen might be willing to try tilapia, he probably wouldn’t be too happy with it unless there was plenty of other stuff happening on the plate. On Epicurious I found a recipe for Spicy Sautéed Fish with Olives and Cherry Tomatoes, which sounded easy, very flavorful, and reminiscent of the Acqua Pazza dish we’d had a few nights before. I made a few modifications given what I had on hand—I subbed basil for parsley, grape tomatoes for cherry, and added some of those artichoke hearts along with a little lemon—and we were off.

Did I mention that it’s been a while since I last cooked fish? It’s been even longer since I tried to sauté any. I have absolutely no idea what I did wrong, but even though I pre-heated what I considered plenty of oil in my non-stick pan, the dang fish still stuck like crazy. Thank heavens there was a sauce to put over it, cuz by the time I removed it from the pan it wasn’t exactly pretty. Anyone know what the proper technique is? Suggestions welcome in the comments…

As for the flavor, it was a huge hit. The fish was cooked perfectly (ignoring the aesthetics), with some nice crunchy bits and a pure, sweet flavor. And the sauce was dee-lish, zesty and rich and packed with salty nuggets of olives. Stephen finished the whole thing! If that’s not a good endorsement of a fish dish for non-fish eaters, I don’t know what is.

Spicy Sautéed Tilapia with Olives and Grape Tomatoes
Adapted from Epicurious
Serves 2

2 T. olive oil
2 fillets of tilapia, red snapper, or orange roughy
¼ cup chopped fresh basil
¼ t. dried crushed red pepper
1 pint grape tomatoes, halved
3 large marinated artichoke hearts, cut into eighths (optional)
½ cup Gaeta olives or other brine-cured black olives, chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
Grated rind and juice of ½ lemon

Heat olive oil in heavy large skillet over medium-high heat. Sprinkle fish with salt and pepper. Add fish to skillet and sauté until just opaque in center, about 3 minutes per side. Transfer fish to platter. Add basil and crushed red pepper to same skillet; sauté 1 minute. Add remaining ingredients; sauté until tomatoes are soft and juicy, about 2 minutes. Season sauce with salt and pepper; spoon over fish.

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Don Altobell, 1938–2006

Stephen’s father passed away on Sunday. He’d been in a long, slow decline from Multiple Sclerosis for more than 40 years.

The Friday before, we got a call saying that Don had pneumonia—longtime readers may recall that he’s been in hospice care at home for over a year; back in September he had a stroke and lost the ability to speak. At the time we thought he had days to live, but he pulled through—as he did several other times, including two previous bouts with pneumonia—but true “recovery” was never a possibility. Each time Don fought off an infection, he was left weakened further, and with just a little bit less life in him. By the end he was shrunken and unresponsive; most of the time he didn’t seem to know who Stephen was, or even that he was in the room. After Friday’s phone call, Stephen rushed down as he has so many times in the last sixteen months. We didn’t say it out loud, but both of us wished that this would be the last time, that Don would finally let go. I stayed home in Brooklyn; the last thing Stephen needed was to have to worry about his pregnant wife’s comfort, since he’d be sleeping on a sofa or the floor indefinitely. The next day, though, the hospice workers sent Stephen home to me, saying it likely wouldn’t happen within the next 48 hours. He said goodbye to his father once again, giving him “permission” to die, as the hospice workers had advised us to do. On Sunday morning, Stephen’s older brother Paul woke us with a phone call: it was over.

By the time I came into the picture, the disease had already taken Don’s mobility and the use of his hands, but it hadn't stolen Don's ability to charm. When Stephen first took me home to meet him, I sat in the living room while he scooped his father out of bed and into his wheelchair. After just a few minutes, I forgot about Don’s condition, so taken was I with the obvious affection between father and son. They talked about old movies—a passion they shared—and the music of Don’s heyday in the early 1960s, when his talent as an artist earned him entrée backstage at Philadelphia’s original Latin Club and the 500 Club in Atlantic City. Don would show the manager a sketch or a painting he’d done of his hero Frank Sinatra, or Dean Martin or Judy Garland or Ella Fitzgerald or any number of other performers, and the guy would be so impressed he’d arrange an introduction. Even though Stephen knew all the stories by heart—and had even made a documentary about his father’s Sinatra devotion, called In Person, which has been shown in New York and used in college sociology courses—sitting there that day he prompted his father to tell them again, for my benefit. Seeing all the framed artwork on the walls, of Don’s home as well as Stephen’s (and now ours), made MS seem just that much more cruel.



About nine months ago—during the summer, I think, though the chronology has become blurry for me—the disease robbed Don of the ability to swallow, and he was forbidden to eat solid food, or even drink liquids. All nourishment went through a feeding tube that had been surgically installed in his stomach months earlier. As you might imagine, for me this was a particularly upsetting development. Don loved food (he introduced Stephen to Philadelphia German Butter Cake), loved Chock Full o’Nuts coffee, and when we’d go down to visit he'd wax nostalgic about great meals of his past, until the stroke robbed him of the ability to communicate with anything more than a blink. When those two things happened—when Don lost the last two joys of his life, food and reminiscing—that was when I really began to hope it would end soon, and without pain. It took much longer than any of us expected, but when it finally happened, it happened peacefully. Don died in his sleep.



The funeral was Thursday, and it was as personal and joyful as a funeral can be. A letter Don wrote some years ago, with messages for his loved ones, was read aloud by an old friend—after all, Don had decades to prepare for his own death. Paul’s 12-year-old daughter read a poem she wrote for her grandfather, and the church was decorated with Don’s artwork. Paul and Stephen tucked a few of Don’s favorite things into the casket with him: an Entenmann’s Danish, a Hershey bar with almonds, a can of Chock Full o’Nuts, pictures of Paul’s kids, and an ultrasound of our forthcoming baby, who’ll never know his or her grandfather in person. We’re lucky, though—when the baby’s older, we’ll watch In Person together, and Stephen will tell all the stories again.



An obituary we wrote for the local paper appears here, on Paul’s blog.

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