Recipe of the Month: White Bean Tomato Cucumber Salad

Our cucumber vines have been very productive this year. They're the same varieties that gave us such a disappointing crop last year, so we can only assume the difference is due to the weather: a really hot spell in late July, followed by a few days of heavy rain. Whatever the reason, we've already harvested 18 medium and 6 large cucumbers, and the vines show no signs of slowing down.

At this point, we've already made all the pickles we can reasonably eat, so this week Brian started hunting for a good salad recipe to use up some of these cukes. On a site called Nourish and Fete, he found an easy-looking one called "White Bean Tomato Cucumber Salad." As written, the recipe called for English cucumber, baby spinach, and quartered small tomatoes—all things our garden wasn't precisely supplying. But it seemed like a fairly minor change to substitute one of our large cucumbers, some New Zealand spinach (a new crop we tried these year with mixed success), and halved Sun Gold tomatoes. The recipe calls for fresh herbs such as "parsley, basil, oregano, dill, etc."; he went with parsley and oregano. With the exception of the red onion, every vegetable in the dish was fresh from our garden.

The salad certainly was pretty and colorful, with its combination of light cucumber, darker green spinach, yellow cherry tomatoes, purple-red onion, and white (or rather off-white) beans. The combination of flavors worked pretty well too, although the dressing was a little heavy on the vinegar. If we make this again, I'd probably scale back the vinegar to two or three tablespoons—closer to the traditional ratio of two parts oil to one part vinegar—so its brightness wouldn't dominate the flavor so much. Or maybe I'd increase the oil instead to make the dressing thicker so it would cling to the veggies a little better.

But this salad's real weakness was that it wasn't very filling. Even with those white beans in the mix, even with Brian's hearty whole-grain bread on the side, I couldn't eat enough of it to satisfy my hunger. I feel like this dish would do fine as a side to accompany a more substantial main dish, such as vegan Swedish meatballs, Soy Curl kebabs, or the grilled Impossible Brats we tried last weekend. (Brian really liked these, saying they were almost indistinguishable from a real bratwurst. I concluded that I must not like bratwurst that much.) But as a main course, it doesn't really do the job.

Eventually, I ended up opening a can of tuna and adding some of it to the salad in my bowl to give it a little more substance. The tuna blended pretty well with the other flavors; in fact, the original recipe suggests it as an add-in to give the dish a protein boost. After mixing in a little over half the can of tuna, I was finally able to get enough food into my belly to feel satisfied. But it did seem like cheating to add this animal product to what's supposed to be a Vegan Recipe of the Month.

So, bottom line: if we make this again, it'll be as a side dish. It could do a pretty good job of adding a little extra flavor to a protein-dense but not that exciting main course, such as plain grilled fish. But as the basis of an entire meal, it just doesn't cut it.