Zucchini & Squash

Zucchini Tomato Salad

Ingredients:

• 1 Tablespoon olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 small clove garlic
• 1 teaspoon crushed basil
• 1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• 2 small zucchini (about 3 cups, diced)
• 1 sweet onion, peeled and diced
• 1/2 bell pepper (red, green or yellow) diced
• 2 tomatoes (about 3 cups, diced)
  

Directions:
Place the oil in bottom of salad bowl. Crush the garlic with salt, and add. Add basil; stir; whisk in lemon juice. Add the vegetables, except for the tomatoes, and stir to blend. Leave to marinade for an hour or longer. Stir in tomatoes right before serving.

Skillet Zucchini

Ingredients:

• 1 Tablespoon corn oil
• 1 chicken breast, cut up
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 1 large onion
• 2 medium zucchini
• 1/4 cup fresh chopped dill
• 1/3 cup sour cream

Directions:
Heat oil in large skillet. Cut the chicken into bite sized pieces and add. Sprinkle with half a teaspoon salt and pepper, cover, and cook about five minutes. Turn with a spatula and cook other side. Test for doneness; when chicken is opaque and cooked through, remove from skillet.

Peel and dice the onion. Rinse the zucchini, cut off the ends and slice thin. Add onion and zucchini to the skillet the chicken cooked in; sprinkle with remaining salt. Cook, stirring, 4-5 minutes. Chop the dill, and add. Remove from heat; stir in sour cream. Serve warm.

submitted by Yvona Fast, Lake Clear

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How to make use of all those extra zukes and
eggplants? Here's the best way yet:

Egg Plant Zucchini Casserole

• Line the bottom of a glass casserole dish with 1/4" tomato sauce. You can use some refried beans for a tomato-based mixture.
• Next, layer thinly sliced eggplant and zucchini up to 1 1/4 inches from the top of dish. You can mix in anything else on hand such as onion, leeks, mushrooms, broccoli, etc.
• Cheeze layer is next. I used Cheddar, but anything goes. Parmesan would be just fantastic.
• Bread crumbs top it off; anything from the type out of the can, to your own special mix.
• Cover and bake for 45 minutes to an hour at 375 or thereabouts.

Bon Appetit!

Karen Dawson, Burlington, VT

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Here is what we do with the humble zucchini. . .
Anne Burnham, Parishville

CHOCLATE ZUCCHINI CAKE a la Lamar Bliss

Cream together:

• ½ c marg or Crisco
• ½ c vegetable oil
• 1 ¾ c sugar

Add:

• 2 eggs
• 1 t vanilla
• ½ c sour milk or buttermilk

Mix dry ingredients and add to above mixture:

• 2 ½ c unsifted flour ½ t cinnamon
• 4 T cocoa ½ t ground cloves
• ½ t baking powder 2 c diced zucchini
• ½ t baking soda ¼ c chocolate chips

Stir in zucchini. Turn into greased & floured 9”x12”x2” pan. Sprinkle top with chocolate chips. Bake @325’ F, 40-45 min.

RATATOILLE a la Glen Mongol

• Sauté mushrooms & garlic in butter (Optional: Cook hamburger with garlic)
• Sauté cubed eggplant; don’t let is soak up too much butter or oil
• Sauté green pepper & zucchini briefly
• Simmer all together with big can of tomatoes, oregano, and whatever else you want.

Serve on rice, pasta, or polenta with chunks or grated cheese melted (in pan or oven)
Vary amounts of each ingredient according to supply.

ZUCCHINI FRITTERS a la Mitza

Put 2-3 T oil or butter in a pan on low-med heat.

Mix:

• 2 eggs, slightly beaten
• 2 c grated zucchini or cooked vegetables
• 1/3+ c cracker, bread crumbs or flour
• 1-3 t baking powder
• ½ c salt

Stir only enough to coat vegetables. Dip in tablespoon, letting batter drain off unto bowl. Lower into fat and fry until delicately brown.

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Pumpkin Bread

My sister-in-law gave me this recipe when I was in college, and it became a favorite of our small young-adult household. One time my roommate, now a dear friend, and I mixed up a batch of bread before travelling the 1 1/2 hours from New Hampshire to my parents house in Maine. We kneaded the dough and then nestled it into a large bowl, covered with a clean towel in the back seat of the car. We set off on our trip and, of course, promptly forgot all about the rising dough.

When we arrived at my parents' house and unpacked the car, we found the dough had risen over the edge and escaped the bowl, onto the car seat!

We slavaged most of the dough, got it into pans to rise and bake, and it was the most delicious pumpkin break ever. (There is a photo of the 2 finished loaves, sitting on the kitchen counter, at my parents' house). I think I've probably made this recipe at least 50 times since then, and never has it tasted quite so good.

Jan DeWaters

Combine:

• 2 Tbsp yeast
• 1/4 c lukewarm water
• a pinch of salt.

Let stand to soften yeast.

Mix in a separate bowl:

• 1/4 c sugar
• 1 3/4 c milk, scalded
• 1 tsp salt

Stir, cool to lukewarm, then add to softened yeast.

Add:

• 2 1/2 c flour, mix until smooth.
• 2 c pureed, cooked pumpkin
• 1/4 c melted shortening, mix well.
• Stir in enough flour to make a soft dough (about another 5 1/2 to 6 additional cups, and can -use up to 1/2 whole wheat).
  
  
• Turn dough onto floured board, cover, let rest 10 minutes.
• Knead until elastic and smooth.
• Cover, let rise until double.
• Punch down risen dough, knead a bit and divide into 3.
• Place into prepared bread pans, rise about 1/2 hour.
• Bake at 400F 15 minutes, reduce to 375F for another 20-30 minutes

 North Country Food Book page

Recently a friend asked me "Do you want an example of North Country crime?" Then, without waiting for my reply, he said:

"You've got to be careful in October. If you leave your car trunk unlocked you are liable to come back and find the trunk full of zucchini."

Ruth A. Cassin

Squashed by the Squash

By Neal Burdick

Last spring, with the kids grown up and gone and our backs going, we decided to downsize our garden. We went from five 8x8 raised beds to one 8x24 plot. In it we planted marigolds because we were told they help fend off deer, green beans, peppers (some of which were supposed to be bell but turned out to be chili of some indefinable lineage), four tomato plants, the requisite zucchini - and a couple of innocent-looking butternut squash seeds in a modest hill. Add to this our perennial rhubarb and sketchy asparagus beds, and we thought we'd have a respectable and tidy village garden.

As the summer progressed, so did our garden, more or less on schedule. The squash vines, though, were a little too enthusiastic, and we had to keep training them to wrap around this and that and trimming them back. We put up a fence to keep the deer at bay, and when the squash vines climbed the fence in an apparent sacrificial offering to the critters, we let them stay there. The deer obligingly kept them nipped back to the fence line and left everything else alone. We pretended we'd planned it that way back in raw, heartbreaking March.

Then we went away for a few days in August, and when we came back, the vines had lost all sense of decorum. They'd insinuated themselves in amongst the bean plants. They'd ascended the pepper plants for a better view. And they'd hauled themselves up the tomato cages and overwhelmed the tomatoes, slapping them down with leaves the size of tennis rackets. Could we have straightened all that vine, we imagined it might reach to the county line--and that's saying a lot, given that we live in the center of the biggest county in the state (though not the biggest one east of wherever, as many people mistakenly insist). We named the insidious network "Audrey II" in honor of the voracious greenery in the musical "Little Shop of Horrors." We harvested what pittance from the conquered plants that we could, threw in the trowel and prayed for blessed frost.

What lessons have we taken away from this?

1. Whoever said marigolds help keep deer out of gardens is a liar;
2. If you turn your back on butternut squash for so much as an instant, it will morph into express kudzu and grow so fast you can hear it, as they say you can with corn;
3. Never leave a garden untended in August if you hope to retain any façade of authority;
4. If you have any sense at all, you'll swear off gardening altogether and get your veggies at your nearest farmers' market - it's cheaper (taking into account chiropractic charges, new tools to replace the ones you smashed in annoyance, and all that), more sociable, less sweaty, and besides, those people actually know what they're doing.
   

And how many squashes did we get out of all those miles of malicious, imperialistic vine? Three, one of which was hollow, much like my gardening skills.