Love through the stomach... » Zucchini

Gardening

Valerie — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:53:38 +0000

Dutch weather is among the most unpredictable things in the world. It gets annoying, really. Between the end of February and the middle of May you can never tell whether you’ll be needing warm mittens or skimpy dresses. There will likely even be days where you’ll need both.

The months in which you have no idea what to wear are the same months I need to start my seeds for my garden. After last year’s tomato debacle I haven’t given up. I actually got even more enthusiastic, buying a miniature windowsill greenhouse and lots of seeds. Instead of buying seedlings, I decided to grow them myself. I also decided to plan my garden differently and to diversify a bit. I started reading up on things and learned scary words like cotyledons.

It’s all for a good cause though. With a little bit of luck and a bit of assistance from the weather gods, we will likely hardly buy vegetables this summer. Everything should be obtained from either our own garden, or through trading with other people’s tiny urban gardens. My friends who grow lettuce will like zucchini, and I can definitely use some salad greens later on.

On March 12th I planted my first seeds. I filled the window box with three types of tomatoes, artichokes, 5 different colors of bell peppers, some chili peppers and eggplant seeds. A little bit of luck gave us some sunny days which made the tomatoes sprout quick enough. The artichokes soon followed and then I waited. Every day I looked at my box and saw the tomatoes getting bigger and bigger, the artichokes grew and besides that, nothing. I’ve never been a patient person, so I’m sure it went much faster than I thought, but really, it felt like the other veggies, the peppers and eggplant, just wouldn’t grow.

Eventually they grew. The eggplant unfortunately lost it’s battle between the repotting of everything else, followed by drying out and getting too wet. When that box isn’t completely full anymore the water balance gets really iffy, I tell you. However, I managed to save my peppers and they are thriving in various cups and bowls now.

Yes, I got a little over enthusiastic, resulting in a shortage of pots and a funny sight of plants in cups, mugs and bowls. It looks festive enough though, and as long as my veggies have more room to grow, I’m okay with washing dishes a little more often.

By now the second haul is well underway. My 4 species of squash are growing so well that the lid was pushed off (and now they live in yet another array of cups and mugs). The second try at eggplant is proving to give me much nicer looking seedlings. The artichokes have been planted in the garden, as well as a couple of the tomatoes (They have grass jars over them right now, to protect them from possible frost.) The other tomatoes are still hardening day by day and will be planted soon.

In the mean time I’m trying my best to find suitable homes for a lot of my seedlings. I only have room for 3 more tomato plants, while I still have 12 left to plant. I can only manage 4 or 5 squashes and I have a whooping 24 in total. If I still want to plant my chicory and rocket I can only handle 3 or 4 eggplants, 2 chilis and 5 or 6 bell peppers, and yes, there are more of those too. Having nursed them from seed, I don’t want to just throw them out.

I can’t wait until the weather evens out a bit. That crazy unpredictable weather should soon give up on the risk of frost and give in to my drive to grow my own food. Within a month or so I hope to be eating the first bites of home grown squash and herbs. And soon thereafter tomatoes and greens and peppers and maybe even artichokes. I honestly can’t wait!

Fior di zucca (zucchini flowers)

Valerie — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 12:25:01 +0000

Fritta è buona anche una ciabatta. It’s what Laurens always says whenever I debate frying something. His great-great grandmother used to say it and the saying went down many generations. It’s an old Tuscan saying which translates to ‘even a slipper is tasty when it’s fried’. (Ciabatta, the bread, is named after slippers, so no, the saying doesn’t talk about fried bread. Not that frying bread would necessarily be a bad thing.)

Since we moved to our new home, I started my little urban vegetable ~~garden~~ patch. I planted various sorts of tomatoes, bell and spicy peppers, eggplant, artichoke and zucchini. The zucchini and the tomatoes have since grown into a jungle and while the tomatoes are growing steadily, but are still green, the zucchini plants have started to supply us with a steady crop.

When the first zucchini started growing, I knew I had to try “fior di zucca”, zucchini flowers. We researched which ones we should pick and when to pick them and ended up picking just 2 male zucchini flowers. (Had I known then that we would be hit by massive rain and no sun, I wouldn’t have done that, because removing those blossoms, and not giving them the chance to pollinate more females, has definitely hurt out crop. That said, I’m still harvesting more zucchini than we can eat, so it’s not really a problem.)

I had researched a multitude of recipes for zucchini flowers, but ended up choosing to go the simplest way and just batter them lightly and fry them in olive oil. I made a very thin batter of flour, salt and water and covered the zucchini blossoms in it. I fried them and we ate them. They were wonderful. Delicate, meaty flowers, beautiful light texture and taste. I liked them.

Laurens wasn’t convinced though. He liked them, but seemed to recall that the fior di zucca that his nonna made when he was a kid had a thicker batter. He was convinced they could be improved and suggested adding egg the next time.

A week or two later we had friends come over for dinner. Since it was kind or a spur of the moment, last-minute-after-we’d-already-gotten-our-groceries thing, I had no options to make an extravagant feast. I decided on simple stuffed shells, made with ricotta, spinach and leftover chicken and figured that would fill us right up. When we went into the yard however, I did see a couple of zucchini flowers that had done their pollinator duties. So I picked them and a couple of baby zucchini and decided that would be an appetizer.

This second time around I made a thicker batter with an egg, a good amount of flour, salt, a little fresh cracked pepper and a couple of drops of water to make it liquid enough to coat the entire flower. I decided that indeed ‘Fritta è buona anche una ciabatta’ and sliced the baby zucchini into disks which I coated in the batter and fried as well.

The verdict: Wonderful!

Laurens was very pleased, this was exactly the way he recollected them from when Nonna made them in Tuscany. Our guests, who’d never had fior di zucca before enjoyed the delicacy and I was happy I cracked the code.

There are millions of options with fior di zucca. Stuffing them before frying (with endless options of stuffings), not frying them at all, using them in baking, eating them raw in a salad. And who knows. As our crop keeps growing, I might try more options. For now I’ll stick with the Laurens-approved version. Because Nonna’s Nonna was right, Fritta è buona anche una ciabatta!

Zucchini grilled with cheese

Valerie — Tue, 31 May 2011 07:46:25 +0000

Sometimes simplicity really is the key to a wonderful meal. Sometimes you don’t really have to do anything, to make something delicious. That’s the case with this zucchini recipe. Actually, I shouldn’t be calling it a recipe. Honestly, I don’t feel this is a true recipe. A recipe to me is something where you actually need to follow directions, have a number of steps and create something totally different from the ingredients. Or something like that. I probably don’t explain it correctly, but for something to be a recipe, it needs to be more difficult than this dinner.

I know not everyone thinks about this the same way. I honestly saw a ‘recipe’ written out somewhere, the other day, for an almond butter and apple sandwich. It had an ingredient list and steps stated. Take bread, smear almond butter, then put slices of apple on top. Ooh dang, now I’ve committed plagiarism, or not, I’ve shortened it, significantly, and I’m not one known for writing short.

Oh well. Recipes.

The dinner I made, which the zucchini and cheese was part of, was simplicity in it’s purest form. It was embellished by a simple, fairly thin pan grilled boneless pork chop and some potato croquettes which I still had in my freezer.

The zucchini really is the simplest thing in the world. You cut your zucchini in half, so you have 2 somewhat even round pieces. Then split those in half, so you have 4 pieces with 1 flat side each. You then slice those in 2, horizontally, that way you can make a ‘zucchini sandwich’. Put some slices of good cheese (I used a medium aged farm cheese) in between your zucchini sandwiches, sprinkled them with some fresh ground pepper and popped them in the oven until the zucchini was mostly tender and the cheese was melted. Easy peasy. Do we call that a recipe?

So was this a simple dinner? I say yes, most definitely. All in all the prep work took me about 5 minutes, maybe less, and besides that it was just waiting to take the zucchini out of the oven.

It’s not worth typing up an entire recipe though. If someone can’t follow ‘slap cheese between slices of zucchini’, I doubt they’ll be coming to me for a recipe anyway.