Radishes and cucumbers.

Radishes and cucumbers.

Funny how you can be doing one thing and your memory kicks in and takes you someplace completely different.

I was grocery shopping last weekend. Cruising through the produce area, I glanced at the radishes, cucumbers, and fennel. Blink. I instantly remembered stories my mom told me about her childhood.

My mom is the oldest of six -- four girls, two boys -- all born between 1932 and 1945. Her family certainly didn’t have it easy. She was 13 when her parents divorced and her father took off for other parts. Her mom tried keeping the family together by working two jobs. But at one point, stretched too thin to keep up the rent, she moved everyone back to her family’s farm in southern Minnesota.

If my mom’s siblings are together for more than an hour, they’ll eventually drift into stories about their time at the farm. They’ll recall their great-grandmother’s perfect white hair, held back in a lace cap, cousins who raced with them in the fields and through the barn, and a Christmas that brought unexpected presents. (That Christmas story made me cry the first time I heard it as a child. It still does today.)

Their reminiscences will always turn to food. Or lack of it. The garden offered up the makings of every meal. Chickens laid fresh eggs for supper. And, as my mom tells it, one unlucky chicken would end up as the much-anticipated Sunday dinner. Each of her siblings recalls a garden concoction they ate then. My mom loved cucumber sandwiches. One of her brothers feasted on radishes and onion slapped between white bread. And, one of her younger sisters swears she put chopped cabbage between her bread slices.

These sandwiches weren’t fancy. No dainty cucumber- radish-onion high tea delights. They were basic, plain, good. They had crunch, snap, and taste. In fact, more that 60 years later, the sandwiches are still among the siblings most preferred. Well, maybe not the chopped cabbage one.

Mom’s cucumber sandwich

What you’ll need:

White bread (store bought or homemade)

Butter (unsweetened)

Cucumber (seedless or not, your choice)

Salt and pepper

Peel the cucumber and slice it into ¼ inch rounds. Butter both sides of the bread. Layer cucumber slices on the butter. Add salt and paper to taste. Slap the sandwich together and take a crunchy first bite. Enjoy.

(Mom also said that substituting Kraft salad dressing instead of the butter is good, too. She’s not a mayo fan. So, she couldn’t recommend that as an option.)