My Husband's Zucchini

No really—I mean the vegetable.
Michael and I have a system when it comes to meal preparation: I plan our weekly menu and make the grocery list. We go to the grocery store together and both do the shopping. One or the other of us (usually Michael) does the cooking and we do the cleaning up together. It's a system necessitated by my blindness, but we like the extra time spent together, so it works for us. Friday evening however, we hit a SNAFU in the system.
We had both had horrific weeks at our respective jobs and so decided to go out to the movies to take our minds off work. We saw Becoming Jane, which is an incredibly beautiful and brilliant movie that I highly recommend even if you aren't a true Austen fan. But for those, like Michael and me, who really love Austen, you're in for a real treat, as scenes from Austen's novels are woven expertly through the plot of Becoming Jane. Anyway, you should go see it, but I digress. Movie times never seem to be when I want them, and Becoming Jane was on at 6:50 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., when what I really wanted was a good 7:30 show. We decided on the earlier showing since I'd likely be asleep by 9:30, and since Friday evening traffic is always a bitch here I decided that since I was home a little early, I'd make dinner. Dinner was veggie wraps. Seriously, there is very little room for screw ups with veggie wraps. It's simply red onion, spinach, mushrooms, black olives, and cucumber wrapped in a tortilla, and we make a spread of cream cheese and Italian dressing. Sounds like the easiest thing in the world, doesn't it? And it is, when you have the right ingredients. The right ingredients being a cucumber, which—though admittedly similar—is a very different vegetable from a zucchini.
I thought the cucumber felt strange, but as I was in a hurry, and it was the only thing that even remotely felt like a cucumber in the vegetable crisper, I didn't ponder the matter over much. I love the smell of cucumbers, so once I pealed it and cut it in half, I took a big whiff. Nothing. No nice fresh clean cucumbery smell. No smell at all. Hmmmm. That's odd. So I again check the vegetable crisper. Nope, that has to be the cucumber. So I chop it up becoming ever more convinced that this is not a cucumber. Ahhh the joys of blindness, where all of life is a surprise. So finally I taste of the darn thing. Mystery solved. The non-cucumber like vegetable is absolutely not a cucumber and is most certainly a zucchini. I stood in the kitchen for a while trying to figure out if Michael was just fucking with me or if my husband in fact does not know the difference between a cucumber and a zucchini. So when he got home, I said, "Would you mind taking a look in that bowl and tell me what that looks like to you?""
"hmmmm."
"Does that look like a cucumber to you?"
Long pause. "It could be a cucumber."
"Uh-huh." So we go about finishing up dinner, minus the bowl of what could be a cucumber. Finally, I said, "You know that's a zucchini, don't you?"
Silence.
"You just aren't going to admit it's a zucchini because then you'll have to explain how you managed to confuse a cucumber with a zucchini, right?"
"Pretty much."
So we had a good laugh about it (I laughed more than Michael) and it sort of took the tension off the rough week. However, if you plan on making the above recipe for veggie wraps, I do not recommend zucchini as a substitute for cucumber.