The cucumber salad I made as a side dish for dinner last night --- main dish was a rerun of chickpea rotini with shredded chicken, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, fresh basil, and goat cheese from Monday night. This cucumber salad was a take on an alternative recipe in Melissa Joulwan's Well Fed paleo cookbook --- I don't necessarily follow the paleo food philosophy, or do the tweaks that make standard recipes "paleo," but that's still a good cookbook, and I use it a lot.
This was a Middle Eastern riff on a basic creamy cucumber salad. Melissa Joulwan included this tweak as an alternative to a basic recipe, but I tweaked it further to accommodate what I had on hand. The dressing is a little mayonnaise (you're supposed to make your own, but I didn't --- I just added a splash of olive oil for taste) with lemon juice, cumin, garlic, and a dash of cayenne pepper. It's supposed to have onions, but I didn't have any. You slice the cucumbers very fine, just paper-thin rounds that light shines through, which reduces the crispy texture some people don't like in cucumbers, toss them with this marinade, and let them chill in the fridge. I added snips of mint leaf, plus one red cayenne pepper I had in the garden and cut into tiny pieces for some additional color. My husband, who basically dislikes cucumbers, ate a lot of this salad and thought it was good. It was refreshing, at any rate, on a heavy, hot summer evening.
I also thought it was photogenic, which is why the picture of it.
I'm going to go to Mass again today at noon --- for much of the last decade, daily Masses in my parish have been in the evening, which has been difficult. Husband comes home from work between 6 and 7, and then it's dinnertime. Up to 6-ish, I'm usually working myself. Getting dinner done and time spent together is always kind of a challenge, even when nobody is rushing out for Mass and then rushing back.
With kids at home I found 6 p.m. Masses even more difficult, because family dinner was an absolute rule for us, and it was hard to make that happen in any kind of decent time if we were going to evening Mass. Once a week was okay, but more than that really ate into our time as a family --- which I think the Church is supposed to support, as a good in the Christian life, not make continually harder (or pose as some kind of binary, as though all the Christian family did, as Christians, was go to church, and if you're not proving your faith by sacrificing your family life, then who even are you?). Anyway, my daily-Mass habit really fell off a lot when the times changed that way, and then I didn't want to go back to the parish for other reasons. I'm happy that this week, under the new pastor, we seem to have at least two Masses during the day. I'd love an 8 a.m., which we used to have under our first pastor here --- get up, get out, get 'er done, and get home. I'm usually up by 7, and it's good to have some reason to leave the house. I could be out and back before the dog wakes up. A girl can dream.
Otherwise, all the usual:
*dog walking
*poetry-submission reading
*various writing
*reading: Cervantes, Plato, and Milton --- there's a whole volume of the Harvard Classics devoted to Milton's poems, so I thought I'd add that to my rota. Been a while since I read all of Milton, or something like it (there's also a volume including his essays, though maybe not all of them).
Wearing today:
*Wool& Brooklyn (S/Long) in Beetroot, bought November 2023, last worn --- wow, quite a while ago, May 25.
*Secondhand Birkenstock Mayaris, bought in April, last worn yesterday because they are a default
Now, I'm going to Mass, which means that I need to flex this outfit just a little. The cultural language of this parish includes a whole vocabulary of skirts below the knee. And while this dress really isn't short by general cultural standards, like at all, I know what's going to make me feel uncomfortably conspicuous in that particular crowd and what isn't.
So . . .
Enter this Flax linen skirt (bought in February, right before Lent, last worn June 4) as an amendment. For most of the day, I'll just wear my dress as is, but to go to church, I can pop this skirt over and be in business.
Washed my hair last night after walking through a massive spider web in the dark, which pushed my general feeling of sweaty stickiness right over the edge. My little ends trims seem not to have wrecked things too much, fortunately. I just washed it, used some LUS 3-in-1 leave-in, squeezed it with a microfiber towel, and slept on it wet. Today it's not styled, but it's not bad, either. It's just natural hair in my particular texture.
OK, well, on with it all.