Three-plus recipes for dealing with zucchini overload.

SEPT. 29—You have big zucchini?  Bill Green’s are cannonballs.

That’s literally true. A few days ago, I visited the alpaca farm of Bill and Lee Green last Saturday, and they loaded me up with more produce than I could carry. You run that hazard when you visit a gardener at harvest time.

I brought home various peppers—surprising my husband, who wanted to make chile verde but didn’t have peppers at hand—yellow paste tomatoes and a red kuri squash. But the biggest motherlode were these dark green, round zucchinis, nearly big enough to wear their own baseball caps. 

Lee called them “cannonball” zucchini. However, when I’ve google that name on the Internet, all the photos show smaller, paler, summer squashes than what weighs down my kitchen counter. 

These websites say that the round zucchini varieties, like “eight ball”, “one ball” and “ronde de nice”, want to be harvested when from 1-3″ in diameter. Up to 4″, you stuff them. Over 5″, you give them to naive friends who’ll be happy to stagger away loaded with mystery produce, not realizing what’s about to hit them in the kitchen.

Three-plus Recipes for Zucchini Surprise

My first recourse was of course ZUCCHINI BREAD, a triple batch that I fobbed off on visitors who wandered in MY front gate. The recipe I used came my old pal Victoria Kaplan of Seattle, who contributed her recipe to a fund-raising cookbook for the Seattle Institute of Psychoanalysis titled “Fresh, Fast and Fabulous.” Zucchini bread recipes are dead-common, so I won’t include that recipe here.

The second recipe was a ZUCCHINI PANCAKE, SUNNYSIDE UP, which Bill likes to make for breakfast. Taking a younger, (no bigger than 4″) cannonball zuke and cut across it in slices no thicker than 1/3″. In a large skillet, heat about 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil in the skillet, dropping in some diced onion, scallion, sun-dried tomatoes, or diced meat. When the oil’s hot, ease in the zucchini slices so the bottom’s covered. Turn heat down to medium, and cook slowly until the zucchini flesh is starting to become fork-tender. Flip, and pile your savories on top. Add sprinklings of chopped herb like cilantro, basil, or tarragon. Then ease an egg into the pan, either to the side or right on top of the zucchini. Cover and let the egg set. (if your broiler’s on and you’re cooking in an oven-safe skillet, you can finish off the egg under the broiler). Season with salt, pepper and more diced herb. Serve hot.

The third recipe was quite good: ZUCCHINI FRITTERS.  This one’s fast: from grating to eating in half an hour. First, put about 1″ of oil into a frying pan and heat to high. Meanwhile, dice one small onion, grate one carrot, and grate about 2 cups of zucchini (a diced green onion would also be tasty in the mix).  Combine all in a large bowl with one egg and about 1/2 cup of flour, and plenty of salt and pepper, plus a pinch of spice like nutmeg, cumin, maybe cinnamon or garam marsala. Your mixture will be gooey, like a wet muffin batter. The oil should be hot by now, so with a big spoon lift out golf-balls of batter and ease into the hot oil. (I thought I should coat these batter-wads with flour before frying, but actually that deadens the taste). When one side’s golden, turn and fry the other. After a few minutes when the fritters are golden, remove and drain on paper towels. Serve hot. 

And finally, the combo recipe: a ZUCCHINI STACK featuring (from the bottom, up) the zucchini pancake, oven-dried tomatoes, diced onion, and cilantro, a leftover fritter sliced into a thin round and fried with the zuke pancake, all this topped with a farm-fresh egg from Island Meadow Farm, fried on the side then gently lifted onto the stack of zucchini treats. Now THIS is a gourmet way to get rid of zucchini!

And I’ve still got one and a half monsters to go…

Though I’ve been gardening off and on for 25 years, it was the long snows of last winter that drove me absolutely MAD to garden (and maybe you, too?)

During weeks of white and cold, I kept my world green by rereading many of my gardening books. Then, for Christmas, I was given Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which has shown countless people how much energy goes needlessly into industrial food production, how much better it is for us and for the world if we could produce our food close to home.  As I nodded “yes YES YES!” all the way through the book, I was also saying to myself:

Maybe something like this happened to you, too. Certainly my growing interest seems in sync with a national trend. Maybe it’s the economy, maybe it’s fuel/food price inflation, maybe it’s just that we want to be healhier, homey, happier. But news on farmers, slow food, the locavore movement seems everywhere, They’re even growing their own vegies at the White House!

It’s growing locally, too: when a class on starting a vegetable garden was announced last spring in the Beachcomber, 60 people showed up. The Food Bank got local funding to start its own vegetable garden. We’ve seen stories on small farms and giant-corn growers, classes on kitchen potagers and food preservation. Just last week, the Beachcomber ran a story about high school kids growing fresh produce for school lunches. Kids, eating their own vegetables!

So that’s why this blog: to learn what the Island has to teach us about planting, growing, harvesting, cooking, and caring for our pieces of the garden that is Vashon. 

We Islanders have wonderful resources for gardening. We have greater access to land than most. We can gather all kinds of natural amendments: leaves, seaweeds, barnyard poo. We can get gravel, stones and concrete cheaply, close by. We have great nurseries, wonderful garden tours, farmers and a farmers’ market, and more than our fair share of Cranks and Originals, those obsessive gardeners who show us what wonders can be produced from our land.

The articles and the blog are a natural offshoot of me tracking down Vashon experts to find out what makes Vashon gardens work. Some of that, you may already have seen in the Beachcomber: my articles on starting seeds, growing tomatoes, sowing a fall/winter garden.

I want to write about Vashon’s particular soils, its weather conditions and patterns, what plants do best in Maury gravel or in north-end blue clay. I want to walk the fields, snoop the gardens, ask the Cranks all the questions I can think of, just so I can learn to grow better vegetables and have a more wonderful garden. And if I’m writing for you as well as me, my information will become more organized, hopefully more amusing, and definitely more complete than some scattered notes scribbled for my personal use.

So watch for interviews from other gardeners, growers and experts. I’ll tell of my own goof-ups, dreams, and small victories, and I hope you will share yours via the Comments section. I’ll trial vegetable varieties in the garden and in the kitchen, and I’ll share photos of tours here and “abroad” off-island.

I hope these articles inspire you AND me to become better gardeners and to know our Island a little better.

Let’s Garden On, Vashon!