My brother-in-law decided early in his relationship with my sister that pet names are great, but only if they are based on food. He started calling her his little cucumber, or “The Cuke” for short. I have a special affinity, then, for cukes. You can stop retching now.

The cukes are in, and they’re abundant. The ones in my garden died early due to lack of love, but that’s totally okay, I keep telling myself, because the guys at work grow giant honkers and bring them to me faster than I can think of ways to use them.

Mr. Meat and Potatoes is on the road until late August, so I’m cooking for for just me and The Parasite That Lives Inside Me, which means using up more than one 16 inch cucumber a week is something of a gassy challenge. I presume those of you with gardens full of the things are facing similar cuke-related dilemmas.

Never fear. There are a few items I’ve been keeping on hand that seem to be pretty nice to have stuck in the fridge, and that last a good while to boot.

First, hummus and tzatziki. I think hummus is expensive to buy in the store. Especially when a can of garbanzo beans is about ninety cents. The problem, I have found, with making your own, is tahini. A) sometimes it’s hard to find. B) it’s an expensive ingredient. Years ago, I ran across a recipe for hummus from Alton Brown, who I ultimately trust on all things food. His recipe for turbo hummus called for peanut butter instead of tahini, and much as I love you AB, I gotta say, that peanut butter is way too much. So I gave up on that easy fix. Until Friday night. I decided to make a batch of hummus for dinner, and couldn’t find any tahini at Target, where I happened to be picking up my few light groceries, so I bought a jar of “natural” peanut butter, and decided to try again, this time with a very light hand on the peanut butter, and if I do say so myself, it totally worked this time, and I have bested Alton Brown, thankyouverymuch.

Mostly, I was just making the hummus so I could have an excuse to make tzatziki sauce, so bear with me and we’ll get to that as well.

Tahini-Free Hummus By Hand

• 2 cans garbanzo beans
• 1/3 C olive oil (maybe more)
• T minced garlic
• lemon (juice only)
• T natural (low sodium) peanut butter
• tsp cayenne pepper
• tsp kosher salt

(These are very loose measurements, as I was just tossing things in the food processor willy nilly, tasting, and readjusting until I got it right.)

Toss all your ingredients into a food processor and blend until smooth. I had to pour the olive oil in as I blended to keep things moving, so I may have ended up with far more than 1/3 cup of the stuff – it’s hard to say. Just keep pouring until you get the right consistency.

When I serve it, I try to copy the look of the stuff at Free State, so I pour a little more olive oil on top and sprinkle it with cayenne (lightly!) for a little color. A thing of beauty.

Next to it, I had the really important part of the show, which was the cucumber-yogurt sauce, or, tzatziki. This is so unbelieveably simple to make, and so refreshing and cool as a summer dish. You can top your hummus, put it on a falafel, or use it as a dressing for a fish taco. Dump it on your salad, dip a carrot in it. Call you mama and talk about it. It’s a versatile little sauce.

Easy Tzatziki

• 1/2 a large container of plain yogurt (I used low-fat and it worked great, but if you can get the thick Greek kind, even better.)
• 1 large cucumber, diced
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1/2 lemon (juice only)
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 T dill (best if fresh, but dried will do just fine too – but I’d up the amount a little)

1) Peel your cucumber and remove the seeds.
2) Dice it up into hunks.
3) Puree it in your trusty food processor.
4) It will be really watery, so I squeezed mine through a double layer of paper towels. And squeezed, and squeezed some more. You won’t believe the amount of liquid you’ll get out of there. Get it as dry as you can.
5) Dump all the ingredients back into the food processor and give it a quick turn just to combine the ingredients.
6) Chill in the fridge until you serve it; it, like revenge, is best served cold.

I also love a good old fashioned cucumber/red onion salad, and the real beauty of this is, you can make a batch, and keep adding to it, so you always have it in your fridge, ready to serve as a side with any and all meals. It doesn’t spoil quickly, so as you pluck more cukes off the vine, just keep adding them, and a little more of this-and-that, to your ongoing marinade.

Marinated Cukes, the basic approach

• 2 large cucumbers, sliced like coins, not too thin – maybe 1/4 inch thick
• 1/2 red onion, sliced into thin rounds
• 1 C vinegar (I usually use a mix of white and red for this, but apple cider also adds a little something special)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 T dill
• 1 tsp fresh ground black pepper
• 1/4 C olive oil
• 1 T granulated sugar

1) Stir up the vinegar, sugar, oil, and herbs briskly until the sugar appears to be dissolved.
2) Put your cucumbers in a colander and sprinkle them with salt. Let them drain for about 10 minutes, and extra liquid will drain off the cukes. This is a good thing.
3) Add your cucumbers and onions to the marinade.
4) Place it all in a flat, shallow dish (I use a flat tupperware container) so that everything is covered in liquid. I like to do this a day ahead of serving, but if you can’t, be sure to let them sit there for at least an hour before serving, to soak up all that vinegar-y goodness.

But the fun part of this is that you can do pretty much anything you want to this basic recipe, to jazz it up at will. Slice up some mango and throw it in there before serving. Shake in some poppy seeds or celery seed for additional texture and pop. Do you like mint? Toss some in there. Slice in a tomato or two. And if you have this mix in your fridge, you can just keep dumping cukes in with a little more dressing as you see fit, and keep it going on into infinity.

The world is your, well, cucumber.