Using up the Zucchini

August has passed and the end of gardening season is upon us. It was a late start, with the lack of hot nights in the early part of summer, a lot of the plants just didn't get the opportunity to flourish. The tomatoes, for example, never really turned color except for one or two weeks. Instead, the green tomatoes I kept hoping beyond hope would ripen started rotting on the vine. Near the start of fall though, things really started to get going. Especially the squash. We have more squash now that we know what to do with, of both zucchini and scallop/patty pan varieties. There's plenty of kohlrabi and the tomatilloes are finally filling in their husks. The peppers are coming in and sadly, a large rabbit has completely obliterated the broccoli.

In the front yard, there is chocolate mint. Oh is there chocolate mint. And I have been delighting in mint tea, with and without chamomile. Since the chamomile never grew in, I have to use tea bags to get my chamomile fix. The mint leaves, though, I just pluck off the stem, give a wash, and throw in my Teatanic tea infuser, a lovely novelty gift given to me by a friend who shares my love of bad puns.

It sinks every time.

To use up my plethora of zucchini, I decided it was finally time to try out the recipe for zucchini chocolate chip cookies from Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle, one of my favorite books on food and eating whose website features an easy print version of the recipe, which I have conveniently included above.

We also took this opportunity to use our handy food processor for the first time ever. It was a wedding present, I do believe, but since we lived in an apartment when we got hitched, there was no counter space with which to use the food processor and it was just relegated off in a cabinet, never to be used. When we moved into our house, it sat there on the counter and I would say, "You know, honey, you should really use the food processor to shred that" and the husband would poo-poo and say it was easier to just do it with our manual shredder.

I'll have you know, I was right. He was wrong. And we have much shredded zucchini bagged and stuffed in the freezer for future use. The cookies were delicious.

And because I had a family reunion to attend in which a dish to pass is required and a mass of shredded zucchini. I baked some zucchini bread too, using my mother's recipe, passed down from her mother. The best thing about these sorts of recipes is that they give no real instruction and often interesting directions. For example, I had to call my mother and ask if by "Crisco oil" she meant "Crisco" as in shortening or vegetable oil. She meant vegetable oil. Why it was necessary to specify a name brand, I leave for you to ponder, but I have left off the name brand placements in my recipe here.

Mom's Zucchini Bread

3 eggs

1 cup vegetable oil

1 and 1/2 cups sugar

2 cups shredded, unpeeled zucchini

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 and 1/2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

2 teaspoons cinnamon (I tend to be more liberal with my cinnamon)

1 c chopped nuts (optional)

Mix together in a bowl, pour into two greased bread pans, and bake in a preheated oven at 350 degrees for one hour, or until the top is firm and golden brown.

Easy peasy and delicious. Some of my more modern recipes in the recipe box require stapling on an extra index card to fit all the instructions. Not the good, old-fashioned recipes of my childhood. They usually contain no instructions at all on the back, just a list of ingredients on the front with a notation for the number of degrees for the oven and length of time in which the baked good should remain in said oven. That's all and sometimes, it's all you should need: a boatload of shredded zucchini, some bread pans, and a list of ingredients.

Flight Behavior: an appreciation

It should be obvious by this point that I think Barbara Kingsolver is the bee's knees. Not only is she a gifted writer but an advocate for the slow food movement and the queen mother of the modern day victory garden/farm return with her nonfiction book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, in which her family lives almost entirely off of the contents of their own backyard for the duration of a year with glowing success.

In the last few weeks, I have finished her latest novel, Flight Behavior. As a fiber enthusiast, I took particular delight in this particular Kingsolver publication. The main character, Dellarobia, is the wife of a man whose family is in the wool business. They keep a flock of ewes and there is a chapter early on dedicated to fleecing the flock and preparing the wool. Later, you see the mother-in-law dying wool in bright colors to sell at the local market.

That aside, Flight Behavior takes on global warming when a flock of butterflies shows up to winter in Appalachia instead of Mexico, while also tackling issues of race, class, educational inequality, and familial struggle. Despite its subject matter, the book gives equal value to its liberals and conservatives. Though the liberals get their bittersweet scientific evidence of climate change, perhaps my favorite chapter consists of the low-income conservative Dellarobia giving a snooping liberal tree hugger what-for. The man tries to harp on how "you people" need to do their part to reduce their carbon footprint. I may be a tree-hugging liberal, but let me just say that there is nothing so amusing as a privileged upper middle class citizen getting his come-uppance when he is forced to realize how the poor in this country live, or rather, live without. "Fly less," he suggests with reduced enthusiasm to a poor farmer's wife whose never even seen a commercial airliner in real life. It reminds me of the look I get from just about everyone when they learn that I still use a flip phone that does not receive text messages (though apparently, it will receive them within the next month).

Flight Behavior is the story of two different cultures colliding. It is the story of how the internet has made people less aware of social graces and the need for discretion. It is a story about how people survive and what they need to thrive, and it explains, in its own simple way, what progress offers and when it needs to be reigned in and replaced with the wisedom of an earlier age. It shows how the land can shape you if you let it, how the world effects us even when we don't want to see the change happening before our eyes. It's everything I would expect from Kingsolver with just enough of the unexpected mixed in.