The Z word. You all know it. By now it’s an entire season… ZUCKINNI SEASON. No I didn’t misspell it, I just combined Zuckhini with yuck and there you have it, Zuckinni! Blea!
This vegetable and I have had a long standoff that began when I was about 5 and my parents were the “clean your plate” parents of the 1970s. I know you’ve heard this one, “There are starving children in Africa that would just love that zucchini goulash!” “Mail it” (I yelled in my head, as I am counting my pennies to buy the stamps). I would sit at the table forever hoping the zucchini and elbow macaroni would miraculously disappear. (I even missed my favorite TV show, Mr. Rogers, because I wouldn’t eat it.) My mom ruined perfectly good spaghetti sauce one time by adding zucchini and don’t get me started on zucchini bread. Why, why, why ruin perfectly good food with a vile vegetable?
I have never understood the mentality of people growing zucchini. They plant it, water it, pick it and then spend the rest of the summer TRYING TO GIVE IT AWAY! All that work for what? To torture the rest of us? And I will tell you right now if I had a dime for every time someone tried to convince me that I am wrong to hate zucchini I would be one rich woman.
Last week was the final straw in my ongoing battle with yuckinni! In town there were boxes of free yuckinni everywhere. The smiling gardeners were threatening to put it into unlocked cars….
I was admiring the beautiful cucumbers also in the box so I quickly grabbed four. Well one was a rather small vile zucchini posing as a delicious cucumber!
I started cutting them up to make refrigerator pickles when I discovered my error. One piece of zucchini jumped from the cutting board when it sensed a trip to the trash can and of course my dog ate it! She loved it! She tried to tell me she knew “the best” zucchini dog food recipe in the world if only I would make it for her. (I washed her mouth out with a chicken-in-a-biscuit cracker and gave her a timeout!) No dog of mine is going to love “zuckhini”!
“The trouble is, you cannot grow just one zucchini. Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchinis will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing the other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchinis erupt.”
~ Dave Barry
Taste of Home columnist Sandy (Anderson) Holthaus lives on a farm in South Haven, MN with her husband, Michael, and their children Zoe, Jack and Ben. Her heart remains on the North Shore where she grew up with her parents, Art and LaVonne Anderson of Schroeder. She enjoys writing about her childhood and mixes memories with delicious helpings of home-style recipes.
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