For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
I try to count them—they are more than the sand;
I come to the end—I am still with you.

Psalm 139:13-18, NRSV

Human beings are precious. The scriptures tell us several times and places that we are made in a very wonderful way. Psalm 139 tells us that we are very carefully created. The New Testament tells us that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit in 1 Corinthians, but the context of that passage does not relate (in my own opinion) to this discussion.

I have a very slow metabolism. My metabolism runs as the breakneck speed of molasses in a freezer. If I were to become a desert hermit, that would likely be an asset. Living in a society of plenty, I find it to be a bit of a liability. I used to weigh a lot more, have been hovering around the same weight for a couple of years, and fantasize about dropping lower.

One of my problems is that I don’t eat any meal but dinner on a regular basis at the same time. Dinner in our house is usually at almost exactly 5:00 PM. Every other meal is just wildly all over the place and breakfast is normally non-existent for me. This is a problem. I have been given a body and I want to take care of it. My ingrained habits are not helping…

I am trying to join my wife in being healthier this year. One way I am trying to do that is to find healthier ways of eating lunch. Rather than skipping meals, eating one big meal, or just constantly snacking my way through the less healthy things in our house, I am trying to be intentional about picking healthier food.

Perhaps that is why I am today offering up for public knowledge the best thing since sliced bread. Okay, the recipe is not that good, but it is pretty good and fairly healthy. I recently got a copy of “Polish Heritage Cookery” by Robert & Maria Strybel. It is a lovely cookbook with a lot of the heritage foods that I keep trying to cook out of my mom’s Polish cookbook, but with a lot better explanation. In other words, I keep messing up my mom’s recipes and needed help.

I was looking for something to make for church the other day and went to the new cookbook for help. I found a recipe for “korki z ogórków faszerowane” or Stuffed Cucumber Corks. I wanted something a little less carnivorous, so I kept searching. The next entry was “ogórki nadziewane twarogiem” or Cheese Stuffed Cucumbers. The recipe looked perfect, except I didn’t have farmers cheese. I substituted some neufchatel cheese and prepared the corks for Fellowship time after church. The recipe as written was not a healthy recipe but it certainly looked good!

The cucumber corks went over smashingly. The leftover were devoured and I went back to try the more carnivorous cucumbers on my own. We had some leftover Christmas Beef Roast from my favorite Irish cookbook. I made the salad according to the recipe in the Polish cookbook and it was good, but the calories were not so great. Additionally, it took weeks to prepare the Christmas roast, and I don’t have that time on a regular basis.

So, I tossed around the question in my head a few days. I wanted something rich in protein, tasty, variable, and more sustainable. I was throwing around thickening up cottage cheese, when I looked down the dairy case to find something very interesting.

Hummus! Pliable, versatile, vegetarian, gluten-free, and delicious hummus! What would happen if I were to take some hummus, take my seedless cucumber, and combine the two with the help of my melon baller?

So, without further ado: Hummus corks! A European/Middle Eastern mashup!

Ingredients: Cucumbers (seedless) and hummus…

The lunch that resulted from this recipe was a very light lunch, but it was decidedly tasty. In the future, I might recommend making this the night before and using the pieces pulled out from the corks as part of a salad to go with dinner.