One Local Summer Full of Zucchini

Flipping though my archives: hmmmm....How to cook a swollen ovary. Because that is what it is.

It’s not very nice of me to bitch and moan about the zucchini plethora we have whilst others are starving and being flooded, just staying above water. Mother Nature sure is pissed (literally) at us! Nor is it a truc nouveau; nothing new to complain about too much of a good thing. Anyone that lives near a farm or gets a CSA basket full of zucchini or those who have at least one zucchini plant will tell you that they are rabbits of the vegetable world. Don’t feed them after midnight, the must be reproducing in your vegetable bin. Barbara Kingsolver talks about the over zealous zucchini in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle but she was not the first to discover this summer phenomena of excess. Unlike their squash cousins who have been filling up mudrooms and root cellars since the time of the colonists, “zuccha” were brought over to the states by Italian Immigrants in the 1920’s.

If you have never made and want to make Zucchini bread. Do, it's delightful. You can also use shredded beets and carrots and bananas. Elise has a good butter-based Zucchini bread recipe, because butter tastes better! Also 101 cookbooks has a few recipes that you can add chocolate chunks, or mulberries (my idea) too. Follow their recipes, instead of me discussing zucchini bread all day long which is one of my first ways of getting ‘rid’ of them, because its been well covered. By the way, Zucchini bread/ muffins/ cupcakes are excellent for freezing, as is just zucchini grated straight into freezer bags for winter days with no greens in sight.

Because soon you’ll be tired of hearing every person with a food blog and food journalist talking about zucchini and how they are flooding the farmer’s market, people using them for rubber stamps, dried for kindling, or as a compost filler. So let me start first, before the tsunami of summer squash descend upon us with some interesting ways to prepare them.

Grilled on the BBQ. With us trying (insert laughter here because MIL showed up with a construction crew to work for 3 weeks and reverse all the money we had saved to date) to save electricity we grill quite a bit of everything including potatoes and beets besides pork chops and steaks. I let them marinate in olive oil, thyme, rosemary, salt, pepper and apple cider vinegar while I prepare the fire. They take longer to braise than most meats, about 20 minutes for zucchinis cut into long fourths.

Zucchini Flan. Floating perfectly in a congealed sea of eggs and Parmesan. It would make an Italian grandmother happy and a French one too, which is who I learned this recipe from. Perfect chilled and made one or two days in advance.

• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus extra
• 3 small zucchini cut into chunks
• 1/4 cup corn starch
• 1 cup cream fraiche (heavy cream)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 1 cup finely chopped red onion
• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1/4 cup freshly grated Grana Padano Parm
• 6 basil leaves
• 4 eggs, beaten

Preheat the oven to 375°. Butter the inside of a loaf pan. Melt the butter over low heat in a small saucepan. Add the corn starch and cook for about 30 seconds, stirring continuously. Pour in the milk, whisking constantly. Season with the salt and nutmeg. Simmer until the mixture is thick, about 2 minutes. Cool to room temperature.

Place zucchini in a large cotton kitchen tea towel, twist it up tightly, and wring out as much of the moisture as possible; this is essential to achieving the proper consistency in the flan, as too much water will make the flan soggy.

Meanwhile in a sauté pan, sauté the onion in the olive oil until it is soft, about 10 minutes over medium heat. Add the zucchini, parsley, salt, and pepper. Cook, stirring often, for 10 minutes; transfer to a bowl and cool to room temperature. In a large bowl, combine the sautéed zucchini mixture, the cream sauce, Grana, basil, and eggs.

Pour into loaf pan bake in a bain maire (with water up to its sides) for 45 minutes. Remove from the oven; let them rest for 10 minutes, then unmold them upside-down on a serving plate.

Zummus from a flickr friend, with expertise in gardens and nature, that I lean on heavily for advice and great recipes like Zummus! Grated zucchini, garlic, tahini (or other un-sweetened nut butter, she says that cashew would be good), salt, pepper, lemon or lime juice. Blend until thick and creamy and you've got zummus! I added cumin, piri-piri and random Indian spices for some kick.

Indienne Courgettes: Zucchini are not from India, so this is a French twist on Indian food. Add other vegetables if you have them

Hidden Vegetable in Pizza Sauce, also not my idea but published a hundred times already in every children’s sneaky secrets cookbooks out there. Steam zucs and then mash in a blender and add to your tomato sauce. They will never know its in there. Carrots and beets can also be used the same way.

Zucchini Flax Seed Brownies. Speaking of health-ish. I made these brownies often for our little family.

Riana’s Ratatouille. Our tomatoes are not in season, yet. But soon we will have buckets of them plus the larger zucchini and lovely purple eggplants that you can expect me to write about all the ways of cooking them: eggplant marshmallows, eggplants with powdered sugar, etc)