My Morning Chocolate

Squash in my Fridge

A small sampling of squash: yellow, "flying saucer", and zucchini

I have an important culinary dilemma that requires my immediate attention.  My fridge does not have enough space to hold even one more leaf of basil!

No.  That’s extreme.

If you gave me a lemon, I could not possibly keep it cold!

Well, not quite.  How much space does a lemon need?

There is no way one more carton of soy milk will fit in my full-size refrigerator.  There simply is not enough room for that!

This is close.  If you gave me a carton of soy milk, it would likely spoil – if soy milk does such a thing – because I would surely have to store it at room temperature.

That’s because my vegetable drawers, my shelves, my butter tray are jammed, packed, stuffed with squash!  I have piles of tiny yellow squash, a couple “flying saucer” squash, and stacks upon stacks of zucchini, some of them longer than my forearm.  The squash is fresh and I need recipes.  Quickly.

Squash on the Farm
But first, a trip into my past.  This squash is so fresh because it comes from my uncle’s farm, where I spent my high school summers.

Picking this summer vegetable is like rolling a ball of yarn around with a cat (or what I imagine this would be like, as I have never had cats).  You try to play nice, but the cat always gets his say.  You may walk away with the ball of yarn, but you also have an armful of tiny scratches for your effort.

Nevertheless, I kind of liked picking zucchini.  It was fun to cut the vegetable from the vine with a knife.  Many other vegetables are broken from the vine by hand; the zucchini shook up my vegetable-picking routine.

Yellow squash is one of the broken-from-vine-by-hand vegetables.  Because the squash is so small, there can be many yellow vegetables on each plant; if you’re slow, like I was, the entire morning is spent in one vegetable row.

I can only infer that white squash is hard to see.  Having worn glasses since I was four, I was never asked to pick them.

Squash in my Food
So I present three squash challenges to myself.  The first, fun and exciting because I like baking and love sweets:  create a healthy zucchini bread recipe for the forearm-long zucchini.  The second – inspired by The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry, a memoir about attending cooking school in Paris – making Patricia Wells’ Fresh Almonds, Zucchini, Curry, and Mint.  And the third, a bit more challenging:  make Mark Bittman’s More-Vegetable-Than-Egg frittata as part of Operation Enjoy Eggs, a ten-day experiment.

As I make these recipes, I remember those mornings on the farm when the air was moist, the dew was fresh, and the day was still cool enough to endure the inevitable cat/yarn fight with the squash plant.  Ah, the experience of picking fresh food.