… and sure enough, she was right: There’s always a zucchini that gets away from you.
It was a stealthy sucker hidden in the deep abyss that I like to call the “squash patch”. It’s a place where small children should never venture, at least never alone. It looks pretty and lush with it’s beautiful bright yellow blossoms, but has teeny tiny thorns that’ll prick you and create a rash on your arm. It has hidden hollows were the local garden animalia gather to play cards, smoke cigars and drink whiskey. It’s a dark place with secrets.
Somehow I missed harvesting this particular zuke—we’ll call him Ed—when he was still a middling, which is, in my opinion, when the zukes taste best. I didn’t discover him until it was too late. He was HUGE. I would show you a picture of him, but I have momentarily lost my phone (with which I took his photo), a situation that is verging toward traumatic and I’m trying hard not to think about it. If I ever find the phone again (wah!) I’ll show you the picture of Ed placed next to a banana for scale. The poor banana, once confident and righteous about its size was made to feel puny and insignificant compared to the ginormousness that was Ed. Ed was BIG. And swarthy. Ed was intimidating and just a wee bit sexy if you know what I mean.
I stared at Ed and wondered, “How in the world am I going to use up all that zuke? It’s too much! It’s too huge!”
Snicker. (It is not often that a girl gets to say that with total dismay.)
Of course, Trudy’s recipe (and warning) came to mind. But I had a feeling that just one recipe wasn’t going to be enough. And I was right.
Ed yielded over 15 cups of shredded zuke. FIFTEEN CUPS!
The average GENEROUSLY proportioned zuke recipe calls for 2 cups. What the hay balls was I going to do with 15?
Loonyville 