I seem to be alive and fine, so it is now confirmed that Thai eggplants aren't poisonous. Hooray! (For context, see the previous post.)

To celebrate my continuing life, I'll share a recipe for a super-easy and refreshing cucumber salad. I believe my mom got the recipe from one of her tennis friends, whose carpenter husband was extremely demanding when it came to quickly producing yummy little dishes for his drinking pleasure. He must have been one of those classic Japanese husbands who flips over the low dining table when he doesn't like the food served. Bowls of rice and mis soup flying everywhere while the horrified yet obedient wife apologizes, kneeling on the tatami-matted floor...

Now, enough of that stereotypical sxxt, and for the cucumber salad. You MUST use Japanese or Persian cucumbers for this recipe. The American cucumbers don't have enough moisture, and their skin is too tough for this dish. Now, cut the cucumbers into small logs, and place them in a bowl. Pour about a tablespoon of soy sauce and a little bit of sesame oil over the cucumbers and stir them so all the pieces are coated with the marinade. Let them sit in the fridge for twenty to thirty minutes. And voila, you have my mom's cucumber salad right there.

It's so easy and tasty that this has become one of our summer staples. For me, it brings me the soothing image of a lazy summer evening, chatting with my family on the wooden veranda while a mosquito coil keeps off the annoying insects. (Our modern house in Japan didn't have a wooden veranda, and a mosquito coil would be just too feeble a force before a battalion of fierce, rural mosquitoes, but it's fantasy that counts, right?)

You can add a pinch of red hot pepper (or a few drops of hot pepper oil) if you like it hot. Goes great with beer, too!

In case you're wondering... the bowl I used for the photo is a sesame-grinding bowl that I stole from my mother's kitchen. It's sort of like a mortar, except that the inside of the bowl has rugged furrows so that you can grind the sesame (and sometimes other things like shrimps or wild yam--and yes, we wash it throughly!) with a wooden pestle. A pestle made of Sansho, prickly ash, is considered the best because the fragrance of the wood is transferred to the ground sesame as the bowl's surface scrapes off a bit of the pestle each time you use it. Next time I go to Japan, I'm planning to get one of those.