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.

My parents live in Glenview, a north suburb of Chicago. It's a pretty boring suburban village with lots of chain stores in posh-looking malls. Not much tasty food when it comes to the bang for the buck, and no coffee house to speak of (well, that's not a surprise, I suppose).

The village has recently seen a sizable change, since the redevelopment of the huge Naval base now called "The Glen." Lots of expensive-looking stores and restaurants moved in, and the traditional downtown area is feared to be drained of its customers. Downtown Glenview is not that interesting, anyway (an old town feel without the old town charm, I should say), so I haven't been there for a long time.

In that context, you can imagine my surprise when we walked into the Sweet Dreams Organic Bakery & Café, just to see what it's like, well prepared to be disappointed. We'd noticed the bakery before and figured it'd be just another storefront bakery, but since I'd started this blog, I figured we should at least take a look. I pulled into the narrow parking lot behind the brick building, while a guy in a black Audi backed up to let me pass (with a pastry in his hand, I noticed). Squeezing between the car and a dumpster, we walked into the store through the back door; it was a whole another world.

The first thing that jumps to your eyes when you walk into the Sweet Dreams is its pink walls. Then you'll notice the carefully arranged, comfy-looking armchairs (some are woven wicker, others are leather) around a fireplace. Then comes the showcase. When we visited the bakery, the two showcases on both sides of the register were brimming with appetizing goodies like peanut butter cookies, flaky apple strudels, loaves of chocolate pound cakes, flourless espresso torte with its top cracking open, orange sponge cake with lots of berries and whipped cream, dense cheesecakes--the list goes on and on. Some of the cakes and cookies were vegan or gluten-free, and others were 100% organic. After drooling around for a while, we decided on a veggie strudel and a slice of chocolate & walnut torte with espresso butter cream.

Unfortunately, though, the food looked better than it tasted--at least that was the case for what we got. The organic veggie strudel had a nicely flaky, buttery shell. Inside was shredded carrots, zucchini and shiitake mushrooms with soy sauce-based seasoning. The strudel came with thick and rich peanut sauce. Each of the three component were all very good. The sad part is that the didn't work together too well. The stir-fried veggies were great by itself (I can imagine eating a ton of it with a bowl of steamed rice--yum!), but didn't go well with the buttery shell. The peanut sauce, on the other hand, had too much of a kick to complement the strudel. It probably needs something with a stronger flavor, like beef, to balance out the peanuts.

The torte, though beautifully presented with a geometric doodle of chocolate sauce on a white square plate, left a spacious room for flavor enhancement. The cake part--chocolate sponge and walnut sponge--tasted like normal sponge cake without chocolate or walnuts powder. Even more disappointing was the espresso butter cream, which, if they hadn't told me it was supposed to be espresso-flavored, I wouldn't have guessed it in a million years. I might be being a little bit mean--for a family-run bakery in the United States, their baked goods were pretty good. It's just that they look so good that the actual flavor and texture cannot live up to the expectation that their appearance creates.

Croatian-style pastries, which Mary Spocic, the owner of the bakery has been baking for most of her life, both in her native country by the Adriatic Sea and in the United States, might be a better choice. The grilled veggie sandwich that a guy was having when we walked in looked very tempting as well. Given the extremely cute and cozy interior (and don't forget the free wi-fi), I might go back there just to give it another try, maybe in the savory food department next time. It is just very nice to see an environmentally conscious café--and a very cute one at that--open in an otherwise bland suburbia where I frequent, and I do feel an urge to support its business. (Another bonus point is that they serve fair-traded coffee from Intelligentsia--an award-winning roaster in Chicago.)

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Sweet Dreams Organic Bakery & Café
1107 Waukegan Rd. Glenview, IL
847.657.1092

Every first Sunday of the month, from 2 pm to 4 pm, they have a free tasting event. Awesome!