The pressure has been unrelenting… my sweet neighbor even brought three gross Yucchinis over yesterday so I will cave in any way for her sake. Zucchini recipes! Here they are.
I feel I must go back and give you a little history on my aversion to this vegetable. Let’s blame it on my mother. She grew up in the time when nothing, I repeat, nothing was wasted. Even if you didn’t like it, you cooked it and passed it off onto your children disguised as dinner.
To call my mother thrifty would be an understatement. We rarely bought paper towels, and if we did, you tore them in half to conserve. She used rags. We had a ragbag in by the dryer where my mom would keep old T-shirts and Dad’s flannel work shirts with the buttons cut off. These rags were used for everything from dusting to washing the floor.
She also liked to sew additional fabric to the bottom of our jeans so we could get an extra few months out of them after we had a growth spurt. Any bar soap we bought was taken from its wrapper and set out to dry because we all know hard soap lasts longer than soft soap. And on the rare occasions, any pop that was purchased was the Holiday gas station brand (10 cans for a buck), and we had to open it with a can key. We had never heard of a pop-top?
The one place my mom didn’t try to conserve money was unfortunately on the electricity of her iron. Why she chose this as her “splurge” is beyond me. She ironed everything! (My iron has so much dust on it you’d think it hadn’t been used in 10 years…. or longer.) “Go get me some hangers” was her favorite way to interrupt Saturday morning cartoons. She even ironed my dad’s bandana hankies. I can guarantee that if my dad had his pockets searched today, you would find a red or blue bandana hankie in there.
Back to zucchini, my mom didn’t grow it as I remember, she got it the way most people do, someone dumped a bag on our front step while we were at the Laundromat. She just couldn’t throw it on the leaf pile, as it was, after all, food. So she dug out her cookbooks and decided to serve it to us straight up, which is to say with the name zucchini right in the title, Zucchini Bread.
There lies her critical mistake. My brother and I wouldn’t touch it. Bread should not have vegetables in it. Bananas sure! Not zucchini! When that tactic failed her, she tried the sneaky approach, grated into spaghetti sauce. Yuck!!! Then outright put it into the food we didn’t like anyway like Swiss steak with zucchini and cooked tomatoes. (Could there be a more vile concoction?)
I have tried my best to bring you three of the least abhorrent recipes I could find containing zucchini. I will be honest with you – these recipes have not been pre-tested in my kitchen. I just couldn’t do it. If you don’t like the results, it’s your own fault for cooking with zucchini in the first place. One neighbor had the best idea. Let the kids make boats out of the zucchini and send it down the river. Bye, Bye, Zucchini.
“The first zucchini I ever saw I killed it with a hoe.”
– John Gould, ‘Monstrous Depravity’ 1963
Leave a Reply