Garlic Chive and Cucumber Salad ニラとキュウリの和え物

Many years ago, we grew garlic chives in our herb garden which was a mistake. For one thing, the garlic chives were a very fibrous and tough. No matter how long we cooked them they were basically inedible. For another thing they grew like weeds and while the flowers were very pretty the garlic chives were rapidly out of control. They have very deep roots and are extremely difficult to weed. In desperation, we asked our gardener if he would weed the herb garden. When he saw that garlic chives were involved he immediately raised the price he would charge for the job. Even now, the garlic chives are still coming up.

Despite all this I yearned for the distinctive taste garlic chives contribute to a dish so recently, we’ve been getting them from Weee (much less weeding involved.)  I have used these blanched garlic chives, for “ohitashi おひたし” with soy sauce-based  dressing or for another garlic chives dish with grilled tofu-puff or “abura-age 油揚げ”.  This time, however, we got the garlic chives from “Suzuki Farm”. This happened in a round about way because I saw that Suzuki Farm offered Japanese cabbage. Previously, the closest thing we could get to Japanese cabbage was Taiwanese cabbage from Weee. So I decided to get some of the Japanese variety from Suzuki Farm but I needed some other items to round out the order and included garlic chives.  In any case, I blanched half of the garlic chives I got and used them to make a salad of garlic chives and Japanese cucumber with a seasoned abura-age garnish. I used a dressing made of mayo and yuzu kosho  柚子胡椒マヨネーズ. The combination and yuzu kosho mayo worked. This is a nice small dish that was just the right way to highlight the distinct flavor of the these garlic chives and above all else they were tender. 

Ingredients: (amounts are arbitrary but this is about 2 servings)
1/2 bundle of garlic chive
1/2 Japanese cucumber
1/2 Abura-age fried tofu puff seasoned (optional)

Dressing:
1 tbs mayonnaise
1 tsp yuzu juice
1/2 tsp yuzu kosho

Directions:
Blanch the garlic chive for 30 seconds, place it in ice water to cool, squeeze out moisture and cut into 1 inch length
Slice the cucumber thinly, salt it and mix, let it stand for 5 minutes and squeeze out moisture
Place the garlic chive and the cucumber in a small bowl add the dressing and top it with the abura-age if using.