Summer salad/snack--Pickled cucumbers and onions

Now that cucumbers are coming along, it's time for my favorite summer salad/snack. We keep a bowl of these in the refrigerator as long as I have cucumbers--and sometimes even with store-bought.
I take some thin-sliced onions and cucumbers and put them in a bowl. Mix 1/4 sugar, 2 cups cider vinegar, 2 cups water, 1 T salt, 1t pepper, and 1 t celery seeds. Pour over the cucumbers and onions. Let sit for a while. Eat.

The brine can be re-used a couple of times before it loses its "oomph." Then pour it next to the azaleas or blueberries and start over.

If you want to get fancy, you can add carrots, celery, tomatoes, or whatever. It all tastes good.

My daughter tells me that a cereal bowlful has about 40 calories. The same amount of coleslaw has 400.

That's a favorite summer recipe for us, too, farmermom. This year, all my cukes were a bust. Too much rain, and then, too hot. Lost my whole garden.

I'll have to try that. I've got a ton of Walla Walla sweet onions... last year, the onion crop sucked. They grew, and we had enough, but they were almost all small... golf ball sized to maybe tennis ball size. This year, there were a lot of other things that haven't done well, but the onions are crazy. I've got WallaWalla's that are nearly softball sized! These are the super sweet type, like the Vidalias but they grow up here in our long summer days. I get my onion plants from Dixondale onions, in Texas, and if you buy them by the case lot (30 bundles of plants in a case) they're very reasonably priced. And the quality is superb.

I grow WallaWalla's for sweet onions- they're not keepers, but if dried well for a couple days and then refrigerated quickly, we have them through Christmas most years. Wet years will shorten that up a lot, though. My main crop variety is their wonderful Copras. Not a huge onion, they're flavorful and pungent, and they keep into MAY of the following year. Heck, this year, I took 20# to our Memorial Day campout and distributed them to the kids... I had to yank out maybe 3 onions in each bag that had started sprouting. I've got customers who insist on buying 20-30# of Copras every year... they say after using them, they can't ever go back to the store onions. My daughter says that store onions last about a week in her fridge before getting soft and yukky...

Summerthyme

I make this all the time too, just with a little less sugar! During harvest this is a hot commodity, my guys all love it for being refreshing and helping them feel more hydrated. I often pack it in their lunches for the field.