This is not so much a recipe as a reminder. With cucumbers and mint both fully in season (going off in my garden) we have been eating a cucumber raita (or tzatziki – same recipe, just a short journey across the Middle East) as a side dish with practically every meal.
This is one of those miracle dishes that seem to make a small amount of ingredients go a long way.
The traditional recipe calls for pomegranate molasses, which you can make by boiling down pomegranate juice with sugar and a little vinegar to make a thick syrup. But it seems a pity to boil out all that wonderful vitamin C in the pomegranate juice, so this version uses the juice straight.
This is the very best fruit tree planting day of the whole year, with the ground wet, our wet season ahead, and the chance of killer heat days now low, but still enough months of warm weather left for trees to establish before winter dormancy.
There are several bits of this recipe that don’t seem right and you’ll just have to trust me! It has no sugar, no butter or oil, only 5 ingredients (not counting water), and though it takes an hour to bake, it takes only 10 minutes to make.
The nice thing about bean gluts is that you can just let them fully mature and dry on the vine, then store them for using in dried bean recipes, like refried beans or nachos or baked beans or ful medames. But I don’t quite want to let these beans go yet.
Many food plants are very good at calculating whether the days are getting longer or shorter, It’s how they tell what season it is. The scientific term is “photoperiodism”, and there’s more about it on the gardening page. There’s no point in cheating with photoperiodism. Plants that fell for tricks like that became extinct a long time ago!