Zucchini; getting creative with

The month of July brought many wonderful blessings and experiences my way. My son turned three years old on the sixth, my dresses have been selling at a consistent rate for once, and my garden has produced enough food to make a dent in the grocery bill. As we near July's end and I reflect on the past four weeks I wonder; just how much zucchini can one plant produce?

Make no mistake. I LOVE zucchini. But damn! Zucchini has been on my dinner plate at least five times a week this month. Imagining all the stir fried zucchini my family has consumed lately makes me feel vomitous and slippery. Picking the vegetable is all fun and games, then you bring it into the kitchen and see it on the counter with the other zucchini that you picked yesterday.. . It's enough to make you want to dig a hole and bury it from whence it came.

After coming inside this afternoon, this attitude began welling inside of me and I happened to glance at my mounting collection of vegetarian cookbooks. The thought of riffling through each one's index for zucchini recipes intensified the sick feeling, so I just braced myself and started cleaning and trimming the vegetables.

I thought of the experimental zucchini concoctions, both from recipe and free form, that I had tried this season and remembered each one's qualities, both pro and con. There was the old favorite: fried zucchini sticks with horseradish dip; delicious, but hardly a meal. Zucchini fritters; good, but not quite sweet or savory enough to constitute repeating so soon. Beth's amazing Zu-canoes; a killer recipe she found in a Moosewood book that had ten too many ingredients (wheat germ, cottage cheese, cooked brown rice) AND ten too many steps for me to manage. I suppose there's no need to mention the stir fry again. What I truly wanted was spaghetti, but I felt guilty preparing a meal I consider standby when I had twenty pounds of fresh herbs and produce on my counter top, already trimmed. Feeling sorry that I hadn't planted eggplants, an idea struck me. Zucchini Parmesan.

I started by grating half of a mutant sized zucchini (the size of my calf, in length and girth) and combining it with a grated carrot, chopped, fresh basil, rosemary and oregano, and five chopped garlic cloves. Then I added a teaspoon of sea salt and a ton of fresh grated pepper. I let it rest in the wide bowl at an angle, then drained the liquid that gathered in the corner.

At this point I threw in two small eggs, stirred it all up, then added enough white flour to make the remaining liquids into more of a batter.

Before the eggs were added I poured a quarter cup of corn oil into a heavy saute pan and let it get pretty hot while I finished the batter. After stirring in the flour I used a serving spoon to scoop the batter into the hot oil.

I let them cook a while to allow them to get crunchy and done all through, but turned the pan around a few times as my stove top is at a shittious, minute angle which makes everything cook unevenly.

I warmed up some canned tomato sauce and boiled spaghetti while the cakes fried.

As I removed them from the hot oil, the cakes were placed on a cereal box to drain, and I topped each one with a bit of bland cheese. When I arranged the plates I put a scoopy-claw thing of spaghetti noodles, then a cake, then a ladle of sauce, then a ton of parmesan cheese, then crushed red pepper and an oregano flower. From start to finish this took around 40 minutes.

Going heavy on the herbs was definitely key for the zucchini cakes, particularly the rosemary, which I normally refrain from using in excess. I once took rosemary and gouda quiche in to work to share and hardly anyone touched it. Offended, I asked my safety supervisor "what the hell" and he apologetically explained "Well, see, in Mexico that spice... Uhh.....What is it?"

"Rosemary?" I offered

"Yes! Rosemary!" he happily replied, "This is what we bury our dead in. Soooo..."


Say no more.
Since then I have been reluctant of rosemary in culinary usage for fear of an impromptu dining encounter with a Mexican.

This was a great usage of zucchini in an atypical way. Try it!