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!

3/16/2008 No Books Fried Chicken

Yesterday was my first dining experience at the chain restaurant Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Sheerly out of convenience, my coworkers and I went to the establishment imagining it would be quick. The KFC building shared a parking lot with the Ramada Inn where my bosses were stationed in Pigeon Forge, and as many of you may be unlucky enough to know, traffic there is miserable. We would have chosen a restaurant called "Kentucky Fried Dog Brains" if it meant we didn’t have to drive down that strip of hell.

As we entered the building we sojourned in the vestibule for almost ten minutes, and when we finally made it to the counter we encountered even more delays. The gal taking our order was also involved in conversation with a drive-thru customer so I thought she was going crazy at first, but then I saw her ear piece and decided it was the other person pissing her off.

I ordered a sandwich on the menu first with words, then by pointing at the picture of it. Every option was an issue:
ME: "can I get green beans instead of fries?"
GAL:Well, we don’t do it that way. What I can do is give you slaw, and an extry side order of beans or corn or somethin."
ME: "OK, Never mind. Fries are cool. Please just make the sandwich without mayo"
GAL "OK Honey". after a couple of minutes she hollers across the counter at me:

GAL: "OK, now, I’m real sorry but all our buns are frozen solid. Is there something else I could get you?"
ME: "Could I just have the ingredients of the sandwich without the bun?"
GAL: "???????"
ME: "Or make it on a biscuit?"
GAL:"???????????"
ME: "Or whatever is fine"
GAL: "OK"

At this point I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to get a chicken sandwich.

When our orders were presented to us I didn’t even know which plate was mine. I ended up getting three chicken strips, an ear of corn, slaw, and a biscuit. It wasn’t so bad, but at the table right next to us was a huge church youth group. The kids were between 12 and 16 or so, and they were in the throws of their awkward youth. There were two adults with the group who sat as far away as possible while the kids yapped, chanted, sang, rapped, and squealed. They were up and down, dancing around the place, throwing fried chicken into each other’s mouths and messing around with the drink fountain. While the accompanying adults practically blended in with the hideous wall paper, the kids ran around the dining room as if it were a gymnasium. Everyone in my party was too shocked to even complain for some time, till Paul stated at full volume "I don’t really get irritated much anymore but if those were my kids I would tie them to their damn chairs and tape their mouths shut" (or something to that effect) He then turned to another person in out party and asked "Do your kids act like that at the restaurant?"

Immediately afterwards; exodus. The entire group filed out of the place and back into their brightly painted church bus, and onward to "The Miracle Theater", or whatever.

miracle


An example of Pigeon Forge’s hellishness is out of the hundreds of businesses (most specializing in fudge, dolls, or wedding chapels) crammed onto a one mile strip, there is only one bookstore, and it is a Christian bookstore. I checked the place because it was a huge, two story building, but it was full of "Chicken Soup For the Christian Soul" type books. Lots of calendars and bookmarks; no real books.