Of jazz—a riff

My mother is a profound believer in the power of zucchini. A zucchini patch, she says, is a meal. It can feed a family for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner on the grill. You name the zucchini recipe, she's made it. She has four recipes for zucchini bread alone.

That one you see up there—the one with the thick, moist center and the thin green flecks—is her standby, the one she makes the most. She's had it for so long she can't remember where the recipe came from anymore—only that it's a keeper, and that it's equally good as muffins or loaves.

She makes the others every now and again—Chocolate Zucchini Bread from our friend Maddie, this Special Zucchini Bread from Heidi Swanson, Lynn's Spicy Zucchini Bread from the Victory Garden Cookbook.

But it's the loaf up there that tastes like zucchini season to me—the one that feels like sitting on the forest green stools at the kitchen counter with a knife and a stick of butter, carefully slathering one slice, then another, until the bread is gone. My mother's made a few twists over the years—swapped whole wheat pastry flour for all-purpose, thrown in a handful of poppyseeds, left in or out the nuts depending on who was home—but essentially, it's the same tried and true loaf.

The other day, I tried a version of my own. I found a baseball bat growing out from a vine wrapped around the raspberries in the garden and grated it down. I dug out a bag of rye flour from what we got in our grain CSA and added cinnamon, salt, nutmeg. I dug around in the cupboard until I found the apple cider molasses I bought this spring in a tiny store in New York, and a few minutes later, packed the oven with two loaves.

It wasn't too different from my mother's—but I was thrilled with the way the squash played off the rye. The shift reminded me of jazz—the way the same chord, played over and over, changes each time. It was a zucchini bread riff—an improv of whole wheat, molasses, spice—the same chord that somehow sounded different, new, just right.

ZUCCHINI-POPPYSEED BREAD

Though I usually make it into loaves, this recipe also makes wonderful muffins. Simply scoop the batter into prepared tins, and shorten the cooking time to about 20 minutes. Also, my mother says it's a good idea to wring out your zucchini after you grate it—otherwise the bread can get too wet.

3 large eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 tablespoon molasses or apple cider molasses
3 and 1/2 cups grated zucchini
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups rye flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 cup poppyseeds
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour two bread tins. Whisk together the eggs, oil, vanilla, and molasses in a large bowl. Add the zucchini and stir well.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flours, salt, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, and poppyseeds. Pour these dry ingredients into the zucchini mixture and stir until just combined. Add the nuts if using, then divide the batter evenly between the two loaf pans.

Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, or until the bread is still moist in the center but just cooked through.

The Local Food Report: a winter market in Rhode Island

If you have never been to a winter farmers' market, I think you should get in your car right now and begin steering toward Pawtucket, Rhode Island, looking for signs like these:

(poster image courtesy of Semap)

Actually, you should probably wait until Saturday morning, since that's the day the Pawtucket market is held, but you know what I mean. I am all business when it comes to this.

Why on earth should you listen?

Well, for starters, if you like cheese, you ought to sit up and pay attention. They have the best ricotta cheese in the world at this market, made by Naragansett Creamery. And if you like nice greens, and liver for making paté, and dried beans, and homemade, homegrown salsa, and artisanal chocolates, and fresh baked bread, you should be there. And if you even begin inching towards your car at the mere mention of trotters (pigs feet! soft! tender! succulent! exotic!) then you should definitely go. Because they have all this stuff, and more.

You should also check out the cooking demonstrations while you're there. Every week, a group of students and a chef from the Johnson & Wales culinary program show up, shop the market, and start cooking something up. They use what they find that day to create an absolutely enticing dish, and then they start handing out the recipe. The day I visited, a guy named Chef David was making a winter veggie hash. It looked very, very good, and so I tucked the recipe flyer into my pocket and made sure to pick up all the ingredients before I made my way home.

In my own kitchen, it was just as good as it had smelled at the market. It's not that the pan-browned potatoes were all that—they weren't groundbreaking or unique, just a typical breakfast hash—but they were a good reminder of what to do with a heap of winter market fixings and a few fresh eggs.

I should add that I sprinkled in a pinch of cumin to mix it up a little and also swapped some of the potatoes for turnips and added in some frozen summer squash, zucchini, and eggplant. Oh! and I sprinkled the piping hot final product with a bit of grated cheddar, which I heartily endorse as a fine touch.


All in all, I'd say hash browns are the perfect way to start a Sunday morning—which, incidentally—dawns right after Saturday's market. Imagine that.

CHEF DAVID'S WINTER HASH

2 cups potatoes, diced
1 cup turnips, diced
1 teaspoon curry powder
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
1 onion, diced
1 cup chopped zucchini, summer squash, and/or eggplant
1 cup cheddar cheese, grated

In a medium-size bowl, toss potatoes and turnips with 1 tablespoon olive oil, 1/2 teaspoon curry powder, and salt and pepper to taste. Heat up a large cast iron skillet, and throw in potatoes and turnips. Cook until they begin to soften, stirring occasionally. (This can take 20 to 30 minutes.)

In the same bowl, toss vegetables (mine were frozen, then thawed, then drained to help remove some of the liquid, and chopped finely) with the remaining olive oil, curry powder, salt and pepper to taste, and all of the onion. When the potatoes and turnips are almost done, throw this veggie mixture in and cook for several minutes longer.

Serve hot, with grated cheese sprinkled over top (it should melt and blend in). An egg over easy makes a nice accompaniment, along with a bit of hot sauce.

Zucchini & brown rice soup

I'm fasting today. According to the radio announcers, the season has passed, already—the new moon sighted and another hungry Ramadan done. But once a year, for fall cleaning, I like partake, late or not.

It was easy at first. The fridge sat, tight-lipped and quiet. I'd had my fill of its contents last night: apple crisp and cold vanilla cream. But as the day wore on, and lunchtime rolled around, the peppermint tea began to roll around like an echo in my belly.

What it wanted, most of all, was to capture the zucchini from the kitchen counter. Strange, I know, after all these months of excess squash, but there it sat, heavy, beckoning, 3 perfect pounds of green. I imagined what I'd do with it: zucchini bread, zucchini pancakes, fried zucchini, zucchini soup.

It was early evening by the time I finally began to cook. I called my mother for her recipe for zucchini soup. She pointed me to the Victory Garden, a favorite cookbook she'd passed on from a library sale, annotated and all.

Beyond the zucchini, I found the rest in the garden. A pot of broth and rice simmered away on the stove, and I began to craft a batch of zucchini and brown rice soup. It'll be just the thing to break the fast.

ZUCCHINI AND BROWN RICE SOUP
adapted from the Victory Garden Cookbook

Makes 2 quarts

Wash, trim, and grate 1 lb. zucchini. Do not salt; the juices add flavor to the soup. Wash 1/2 lb kale leaves, dry, and cut into thin strips. Bring 6 cups chicken broth to a boil, stir in 1/2 cup long-grain brown rice, lower heat, cover, and cook slowly until the rice is just tender, about 40 minutes.

In a large sauté pan, cook 1 and 1/2 cups sliced onions in 3 tablespoons butter until wilted and golden. Stir in zucchini and cook, stirring, for 4-5 minutes. There will be moisture left in the pan. Mix in the kale, and cook, stirring, until barely wilted. Set aside. When the rice is cooked, stir in the zucchini mixture, heat through, and season with salt and pepper. The soup will have a beautiful green color and will be fairly thick. Thin with additional broth if you wish.

The Local Food Report: fried zucchini blossoms

According to my friend Anna, fried zucchini blossoms are a Mexican thing. She tells me this as I stand in her doorway, exasperated and a bit confused, relaying what I fear will be an afternoon disaster. "I am attempting my first fried delicate flower," I tell her, in hopes that saying will turn to believing.

The truth is, I have never been good with cooking experiments of a delicate nature. Where the loose, basic principles of the kitchen are important, I move about with ease. But when it comes to precision—to the instant, say, of protecting the kid-glove shape of a delicate flower—I tend to become overzealous. I pinch off a petal or dip too deep, and the yellow blossoms crumple into a brown, rumpled mess.

Still, taste rarely fails, and so on Anna's suggestion I make my way home to find out what Mexican cuisine has to offer. Thankfully, the stalwart cooks of the south aren't too keen on precision, either. Instead, they favor frying the blossoms with hot peppers and onions, and sandwiching the whole fiasco with queso fresco into a piping hot quesadilla.

With delicacy pushed aside, I get to work. I pull out a good heap of onions, hot orange peppers, smoky cherry tomatoes, and several cloves of garlic. The knife flies across the board, slicing and dicing and mincing until my eyes begin to well and olive oil fries hot in the pan. I drop onions then garlic, cherry tomatoes and peppers onto the cast iron and stir carefully before adding the final ingredient.

I'd collected the last of the blossoms—males only, with no squash before their stem—that afternoon. Ten in all, they hit the pan wide eyed with a start before beginning to soften. Soon form yields to heat, and I leave the mixture to cool beside a mound of grated Cabot cheddar. When the steam has subsided, I toss the two together and spoon it evenly across ten flat tortillas.

Folded and sealed, they sizzle in remnants of hot oil and the dark heat of the griddle. Cheese melts into blossoms, and they emerge, sweet, crisp, and—some might even say—delicate.

QUESADILLAS DE FLOR DE CALABAZA

Makes 10 small quesadillas

Adapted from a recipe said to have originated at El Bodegon del Guillermo, a popular Tijuana restaurant that burned to the ground in 1978.

Fry 1/2 white onion and 1 clove minced garlic in several tablespoons olive oil until translucent. Add 10 halved cherry tomatoes and cook until soft. Add 10 squash blossoms, 1 minced hot pepper, and salt and pepper to taste, and cook several more minutes. Spoon into a bowl and let sit until cool.

Toss with 6 ounces grated cheddar, and spoon evenly onto one side of each of 10 small flour tortillas. Fold tortillas over; fry in hot oil, flipping once, until tortillas are crisp and cheese melts. Eat hot.

Zucchini pancakes

It became clear things were desperate when I began staring at the three terribly large zucchinis on my kitchen counter as potential breakfast objects. We'd eaten tens of the squashes for lunch and dinner in stir-fries, salads, breads—even desserts.

But when the morning meal rolled around, there was no choice but to continue. The plants' leaves may be yellowing, but they show no signs of stopping. So rather than revolt, I pulled out my trusted pile of cookbooks and started paging.

The problem was, no author was this desperate. They listed casseroles and gratins, minestrones and breads. Even amidst the many listings for chocolate chip zucchini cookies I could not find an answer. So I turned instead to a new plan. Rather than hunt for a breakfast recipe already involving zucchini, I would think first of what I wanted to eat, and then devise a way of adding the squash to it.

Almost immediately, my thoughts turned to pancakes. I could see the stack, several inches wide and four puffy cakes high, drowning in syrup and topped with a quickly cascading pat of melting butter. I'd been subsisting on breakfasts of fruits and tomatoes, delicious as they were, for months now; it was time for a lumberjack breakfast.

I pulled out the mixing bowl and began adding the traditional ingredients for a hearty stack. I sifted flour and baking powder, sugar and salt, and whisked together a whirlpool of milk and egg. In went vanilla and butter and a touch more flour, and it was time for the moment of truth. I grated a cup of zucchini, and threw it on the pile.

Several minutes later, the griddle was sizzling and the smell of sweet batter steamed up through the kitchen hood. I pulled out plates and syrup, a knife and a fork, and sat down to the perfect stack of my imagination. If it hadn't been for a few green flecks and an ever so slight sweet, zucchini flavor, I may never have known the difference. Zucchini pancakes proved to be one experiment I'll happily repeat.

ZUCCHINI PANCAKES

Serves 2

Mix together 1 cup whole wheat flour, 3/4 teaspoon baking powder, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 1 and 1/2 tablespoons sugar. In a separate bowl, whisk together 3/4 cup milk, 1-2 tablespoons melted butter, 1 egg, and 1/4 teaspoon vanilla. Add 1/2 to 1 cup shredded zucchini (depending on taste) and stir into dry ingredients until just barely mixed. Fry in butter on hot griddle or cast iron pan until golden. Serve hot with butter and maple syrup.