Seasonal recipe No 7 – Cucumber raita

Serve this as a side dish with curries or simply as a dip. This recipe is from Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook.  Without the turmeric and with a bit more garlic and a tablespoon of olive oil, you’ll have Greek tzatziki. And the Turkish cucumber and yoghurt salad cacik is pretty much identical too.

Draining time: 30 minutes
Preparation time: 5 minutes

Serves 4-6

Ingredients
½ cucumber
¼ teaspoon fine salt
200g mild natural yoghurt
small bunch of mint
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
small pinch of ground turmeric or paprika

Method
Grate the cucumber – you don’t need to skin – and put it in a sieve over a bowl. Sprinkle it with the fine salt and leave it to drain for half an hour. Pat the cucumber dry with kitchen paper. Mix with the yoghurt, mint, garlic and just enough water to give you the consistency you want, usually in the region of 100ml. Add a pinch of turmeric for extra flavour and pale yellow colouring or sprinkle paprika over the top.

Notes
I didn’t find it necessary to add water! There are many variations on this recipe: Delia Smith slices rather than grates the cucumber and adds a finely chopped spring onion, 2 pinches cayenne pepper and 1 pinch cumin seeds; Madhur Jaffrey doesn’t bother with draining the cucumber and uses 1 pinch roasted cumin seeds. But whichever way you make it, it’s a refreshing and cooling dish.

Click here to see all the recipes that Camel CSA members have recommended so far.

This week’s boxes

We are enjoying some more of our recently-harvested onions in Camel Community Supported Agriculture’s veg boxes this week. 

The Swiss chard, beetroot and potatoes also come from our own plot at St Kew Highway. 

Our expert growers have provided most of the rest of the vegetables.  Jeremy Brown cultivated some of the cucumbers and the flat-leaved parsley.  Jane Mellowship supplied the salad packs.  Mark Norman grew the courgettes and the remaining cucumbers, which feature in our Recipe No 7 – Cucumber raita.

We have a new local supplier – Polmorla Market Garden, Wadebridge – which provided the freshly-picked runner beans.  Unlike the rest of the box contents, these are not grown organically.

Oops!

The boxes also contain bunches of celeriac leaves, picked in ignorance as they were mistaken for mature flat-leaved parsley. 

These could be used as a garnish on salads or soup.  However they are rather coarse and have a distinctive, strong flavour.

It emerges that I may have caused irrevocable damage to our celeriac crop as a result of this inadvertent act of horticultural vandalism.  This is one of the downsides of relying on enthusiastic amateurs like me. 
S-o-o-o embarrassing!