Posts Tagged zucchini

i’d eat that

August.5.2009 at 9:55 am · Filed under kitchen ·Tagged , , , ,

before baking

before baking

well… it’s definitely not a summer squash. i cut it, i cooked it, i ate it, and i still have no idea what it was. the skin is thick and tough, the seeds are flat and wide and it takes a loooong time to cook.

i found a recipe for cooking crookneck squash that called for the squash to be layered in a casserole dish with tomatoes and baked for 15 minutes. my pantry was lacking, so i made some substitutions. i layered zucchini, squash and yellow onions and topped them with the mixture of red wine vinegar and dijon mustard that the recipe called for. it took forever to cook and i don’t think either the zucchini or the squash ever got fully tender.

final verdict: i thought it was ok, nothing spectacular. erik tried it and actually said “i’d eat that. it’s not smooshy like squash usually is.” i guess another trick to giving squash the ‘erik seal of approval’ is undercooking. who knew.

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zucchini + cheese = delicious

August.4.2009 at 11:19 am · Filed under kitchen ·Tagged , , , ,

a few things to know about cooking:

  1. soup has no place being served in a cup; it is not a beverage
  2. sweetbreads are neither sweet nor bread
  3. if you can’t make it better by adding bacon or cheese, it’s probably a lost cause
ingredients

ingredients

baking is a complicated science; there are chemical reactions going on in there. you can’t just substitute ingredients all willy nilly like you can in the plain ol’ cookin’ world. when a recipe calls for buttermilk and all you’ve got is skim, you need to get creative. apparently baking powder reacts with accidity and soda with heat, if you use the wrong stuff, the results may not be pretty (see june’s pumpkin muffins). turns out, you can make your own buttermilk. 1 cup of regular milk plus 2 tablespoons white vinegar gets you a somewhat chunky, cottage cheese-like product, but the final result is just about the same.

while the final product wasn’t the prettiest thing to look at, it sure did taste good. it was like a giant loaf of cheez-its with a fault line down the middle. instead of serving it in slices, we tore into it with our bare hands like some sort of zucchini savages. at least i’ve come up with another successful recipe to disguise zucchini and make it erik approved. if you add cheese, they will come.

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zucchini overload

August.2.2009 at 1:08 pm · Filed under garden ·Tagged , ,

this week's harvest

this week's harvest

the tomatoes and peppers are starting to ripen, the cucumbers are out in full force and the mutant gourd-squashes continue to multiply, but nothing is growing as fiercely as the zucchini. i’ve collected 5 in the past 4 days, each one larger than the last.

zucchini is not the most versitile vegetable. pasta, soup, bread… my ideas are running thin, and it doesn’t help that erik has a deep seated hatred for all members of the squash family. clearly there is a childhood trauma behind that story, but i’ll save that for another time. in the meantime, i think some will get frozen, some will be given away and the rest will get turned into zucchini bread, the only squash product erik has deemed acceptable.

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