What to Cook If There Are Too Many Zucchini
It’s zucchini season and my zucchini is running wild. The plant is prolific and the zucchini are big, which is fine because I have several ways to pop zucchini in my mouth. Here are my favorite ways to deal with too much zucchini if you find yourself in a similar situation.
Make an Incredible Pasta Sauce
I rarely cook from recipes, but I strictly follow this zucchini butter spaghetti recipe (it works well with riffs though). The zucchini is crushed and fried in oil until it turns into a delicious mass of sweet, concentrated, lightly caramelized vegetable porridge. This porridge is diluted with pasta water, tossed with spaghetti (or some other pasta) and topped with very salty table cheese. (Tip: The contents of the shaker emulsify in the sauce like a dream.)
The recipe is for two and uses 1 1/4 pounds of zucchini, but you can always double or triple that for a crowd, or enjoy leftovers for a few days. (Just save some pasta water to thin it out.) Do you have zucchini? Almost the same dish can be cooked with cucumbers , which sounds strange, but is actually very tasty.
Eat butternut squash for breakfast
It’s no exaggeration to say that Smitten Kitchen’s spaghetti pasta really got me into zucchini. I used to really like it, but cooking it into this oily, concentrated porridge has given me a new understanding of what zucchini can be .
In addition to an amazing pasta sauce, this porridge makes a pretty incredible spread , and this spread is phenomenal on fried egg toast. You can also toss a handful of cherry tomatoes into the porridge, which is good because cherry tomato plants don’t stop once they start growing.
Cook the porridge until it looks like the one in the photo above (concentrated and almost dry), then spread it on a thick piece of toast and toss an egg on top. Finish off with fried zucchini flowers if you have them.
Make a big cucumber
Sometimes you do not have many zucchini, but a lot of one zucchini. If you find yourself with a huge zuk , you should use it to make a huge jar of huge pickles , much like Vlasik’s hamburger stackers in my youth. (If your brine is too small for your burger, you need a bigger brine.) You can use any brine you like, but I’m partial to this bread and butter style brine, which is incredible on a super salty ham sandwich.
Stuff flowers with leftovers
You don’t want to go overboard with culling the flowers (because they’re future squash or they’re needed to make future squash, depending on the sex of the flower), but if you find your flowers are shedding, you should stuff them. them with the rest.
Flowers are best eaten fresh (find out how to harvest and store them here ), but there is no one right way to stuff them. Cheese is popular, but feel free to play weird with it like I did before :
Leftover french fries are exceptionally delicious—cheese and potatoes merge to form a fatty carbohydrate mass—but you can also use fried rice, noodle dishes, mashed potatoes, whatever! Everything is fine! Search your fridge and chop it all up until it’s small enough to stuff it with a flower.
Fill the flower with stuffing, then coat it with a simple batter and fry in a few inches of oil at 350 degrees. Serve immediately.
make a caesar salad
Caesar dressing is a great condiment, so it doesn’t make sense to let the salad have all the fun. Don’t overdo it: Mix a handful of thinly sliced zucchini with your favorite caesar dressing , then make some frico and crumble some crispy cheese on top. Devour and repeat until you run out of zucchini.