Good Real Food

Like so many midwesterners in late August, I find myself completly overrun with monster zucchini and summer squash. I have included a recipe in this post that I made up to use up the bunnies in unique and yummy ways: Chocholate Zucchini Bread. But first, as an homage to my father, Jim Heynen, I want to share with you his short story about zucchini.

Garden Rabbits, by Jim Heynen
There were the fuzzy sharp-toothed ones that nipped tender shoots of lettuce and cabbage before they could dream of the salad bowl, the kind that multiplied as quickly as aphids and were as hard to discourage from their nibbling ways. But there was another kind of garden rabbit. These too were fruitful and multiplied in great abundance, though they did not hop. They were zucchini.
The boys did not like to eat zucchini very much. The taste was as dull as potatoes without salt or butter or sour cream, and the texture was slimy as cooked okra. But in August when the lettuce had bolted and the cabbage had died, when even most of the tomatoes had ripened and the wine-colored beets bulged from the earth ready for harvest, the zucchini caught a second breath: the yellow blossoms quickly turned into small green fingers that within a week were the size of cucumbers and in two weeks the size of small watermelons. Why couldn’t the animal garden rabbits eat these vegetable garden rabbits instead of the carrots and lettuce?
If the boys didn’t do something, they knew it would mean zucchini in eggs for breakfast, fried zucchini and onions for dinner, boiled zucchini for supper. Zucchini casseroles! Zucchini salads! Zucchini pie if there was a recipe for one hiding somewhere!
The oldest boy had a plan. Over supper, as they all swallowed the soggy chunks of zucchini, he said, We have so many zucchini, we should give some to the poor people who don’t have anything to eat.
The oldest boy had never in his life suggested giving anything to anybody, not even to his friends. And now he was thinking of poor people he didn’t even know?
The grown-ups thought it was a wonderful idea and even brought it up in their family devotions: That the abundance of the earth should be given to all, they prayed. Yea, even to the neediest of our number.
On Saturday night the boys loaded the car trunk with big zucchini before they went into town. The boys agreed that they would spend the evening giving the zucchini to poor people they met.
Look at them, said one of the grown-ups, as the boys loaded their arms with zucchini and started down the streets looking for poor people. Aren’t they wonderful?
The boys couldn’t really tell a poor person from a rich person, so they started offering zucchini to everyone they met. They figured the rich people wouldn’t take them and the poor people would. But it seemed that poor people were few and far between when it came to feeding them zucchini.
When the boys got to the big parking lot next to a WalMart that had just replaced most of the stores downtown, the oldest boy said, Let’s just put some in the back seat of everybody’s car. We might not be getting them to poor people, but at least we’re still giving them away.
This is what they did and within a half hour they were rid of all the zucchini. The grown-ups thoughts the boys’ charity had been so successful that they let the boys load up the trunk of the car with zucchini the next Saturday night too.
The boys went straight to the WalMart parking lot. But word had gotten out that if you didn’t lock your car doors somebody would fill the back seat of your car with giant zucchini.
Oh no, said the oldest boy, after they had tried all the car doors in the parking lot. We’re stuck with them. We’ll be eating zucchini until Christmas!
Then one of the boys pretended to drop one on the street as he crossed on the way back toward their car. The other boys followed suit, dropping zucchini, one after another. Whoops, whoops, whoops, as the zucchini dropped to the street.
The boys stood on the sidewalk and watched the cars pass by, some of them slowing down and swerving to miss the shattered vegetables. But in a few minutes the zucchini had been mushed up and the cars didn’t even slow doen. And that was how the last of the green garden rabbits died. Smeared out on the street like so much road kill.

Chocolate-Zucchini Bread
-1 1/2 cups brown sugar
-3/4 cup sunflower or safflower oil
-3 eggs beaten
-1 1/2 tbsp melted butter
-1 tsp vanilla
-2 cups grated zucchini
-1 1/2 cups white flour
-1 cup whole wheat flour
-2 tsp baking soda
-1 tsp baking powder
-1 tsp salt
-2-3 tbsp good quality cocoa powder
-1 tsp cinnamon
-1 tsp ground cloves

Preheat the oven to 350F
1. In a large bowl combine the sugar, oil, eggs, butter and vanilla and beat well with a whisk. Mix in the grated zucchini. 2. In a separate bowl, combine all the remaining dry ingredients and mix well. Gently stir the dry mixture into the wet. Pour the batter into a well-oiled loaf pan and bake for approximately 1 hour, until firm and a toothpick comes out of the center clean. Cool for 15 minutes before removing from the pan.

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My parents brought a dozen meyer lemons from their tree in San Francisco. Used some in salad dressing, been putting them in water glasses. I’m not used to having lemons around.  Do you keep lemons always? For what? Can I freeze the zest of the last three? Can I just freeze lemon slices? I know their days are numbered.

And, also, we have five scotch bonnets and there is no way I can eat them on my own and N. is leaving me for almost a week. What to do? Make some kind of salsa? Pickle them? Dry them?

PS, from the eat your vegetables department, mystery greens (Mr. Prince, the gardener up the street, calls it spinach, but it isn’t. More kale-y) cooked up with mint, leftover brown rice, a dash of habanero powder that Paul gave us for some reason. (You know I’m the last one to say that a gift has to be new, but there must be a story behind half a jar of powdered spice with the label faded and wearing off.) It was most excellent. Mmm, and some Parmesan.  I am going to have to start working on my protein intake, I think. I tend to just assume that they’re right when they say most Americans eat too much protein and I shouldn’t fret.  And, um, ice cream with almonds is a good source of protein, right? That is my other new trick, salted almonds in my ice cream.  I finished Reading Lolita in Tehran which is the subject of one strangely obtuse and contentious wikipedia entry, and which features a narrator who regularly pours cold coffee over toasted walnuts and ice cream and which, somehow for me turned into salted almonds and ice cream. And looking more closely at what I can learn from fiction.

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Caroline wants pickling advice and I’m afraid to tell her I don’t know a thing. I mean, I know a lot right? I know everything. But I’m too lazy to do much more than put more vegetables in the turnip pickle juice when the turnips start to run out. Sliced white onions are good for that. So are green tomatoes. Sliced or whole. Then you can put them on sandwiches. Mmmm. Sometimes I put carrots in, which don’t go well on sandwiches and are better fresh anyway. After a few rounds of onions the brine starts to get funky and I dump it.

This week, though, I made a batch of Korean turnip pickles, that came out pretty great in a garlic skunk kind of a way. Hsuan offered a book of simple Japanese pickles (which she still hasn’t delivered. I gave her some pickled turnip today to help her remember …) which got me thinking that Madhur Jaffrey would probably have some useful advice. I had to adapt a little, since I don’t have any dried Korean chilies and I couldn’t find scallions and I wanted to pickle a lot more than three small turnips.

Note: I think preserving things is one of those adventures that can lead to botulism, so, um … you know. Think for yourself here. Look up a recipe. When in doubt, throw it out.

I started with 4 or 5 really really big turnips, which I sliced about a quarter inch thick, sprinkled lightly with salt, and let sit for a few hours in a glass bowl. I gather that glass is important if you don’t want rust and funky reactions going on. I rinsed and rinsed and chopped up two monster cloves of garlic (I’m thinking now that one would have done it) and one small white onion and one nice hot chili. I don’t remember what variety it was, it was from the green market and it was super spicy. Only you know how spicy you like your pickles. I added ~2tsp of salt and a tsp of sugar and stirred it all around and added enough water to cover the whole business in a glass jar. I added three or four impossibly small beets because pink pickles rule and what else are you going to do with three or four impossibly small beets?

Rest a saucer loosely on top. It was supposed to sit for 6-8 days but I put a real lid on it and stuck it in the fridge on day 5, for no good reason. I had them in my lunch today. Like I said, I think one clove of garlic would have done it–I won’t be getting any mosquito bites tonight!

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