News from the Farm: Use your zucchini!

We like to say that the only time you need to lock your car in Vermont is during the summer, when everyone's looking for places to ditch extra zukes.  So, stuck inside because of all this Irene-induced rain, I thought now's a good time to share my three favorite ways to use it all up and free myself from zucchini-wasting guilt.

Once you have bored of zucchini bread, ratatouille, and sauteed zukes try :
Chocolate Zucchini Cake, Zucchini Relish, and Zucchini Pasta:

1)  Chocolate Zucchini Cake
          I use a recipe from Fanny Farmer's baking book, a sweet oldie timie cookbook I got years ago at the Strand in NYC.

• 3/4 cup butter
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• 2 1/2 cup flour
• 2 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 2 cups shredded raw zucchini
• 1/2 cup milk

Cream butter and sugar, then beat in eggs. Sift together and add flour, baking powder, soda, cinnamon, salt and cocoa. Mix well. Add vanilla, zucchini and milk. Stir until well blended.

I usually use two squares of baker's chocolate, never seem to have oranges to zest and sometimes substitute honey for some or all of the sugar (we have hives so there's ample honey around here).
Other thoughts are adding some hot pepper (maybe something smokey like ground chipotle), adding raisins or chocolate chips or making cupcakes with frosting.
I skip the frosting, throw it in a tube pan, sprinkle powdered sugar and call it a day.  (bake at 350 for an hour for tube pan.)
SOOO Good warm!

2)  Zucchini Relish
This is just like pickle relish, but tastier and with zucchini (obviously)
I use "Margaret Hawes's Zucchini Relish from Putting Food By (on of my two canning/freezing/drying bibles).  Here's the recipe, but remember the things you don't want to mess with are the vinegar and sugar (unless you know what you're doing) but I alter the seasoning and the vegetables, depending on what I have in the pantry and in the garden.

Ingredients

• 10 cups finely chopped zucchini (if small, leave in the seeds; if over 8 inches, remove seeds)
• 4 large onions
• 4 green bell peppers, seeded
• 4 red bell peppers, seeded
• 1/2 cup salt
• 2-1/2 cups white vinegar
• 4 cups white sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 2 teaspoons celery seed
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

Preparation:  Wash and peel zucchini, removing stems and blossom ends; remove seeds if squash is cut in large chunks for grinding. Peel and quarter onions; seed and quarter the bell peppers. Put vegetables through the food grinder, using a coarse knife. (With a food processor, use the shredding disk: the steel blade can make these ingredients lose too much texture.) Put ground vegetables in a crockery or stainless steel bowl, stir in the salt; keep the vegetables in the resulting brine by holding them down with a weighted plate. Let vegetables stand overnight. The next day, drain off the brine and rinse vegetables with cold water; drain again, and squeeze well by hand. Mix cornstarch with the sugar and four other dry seasonings, add all to the cold vinegar, blending well. Over medium heat, bring to boiling, stirring well to prevent lumping. When sugar is melted and the syrup is clear, add the vegetables; simmer 30 minutes, stirring often. Pour into clean very hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch of headroom; adjust sterilized lids, and process for 10 minutes in a 185 F/85 C water bath. Remove; complete seals if necessary.

3)  Zucchini Pasta

This is so good, even my kids that don't like sauteed zukes, love this pasta.  When cooking, I'm not much for measuring and mostly use recipes as "guidelines," as my husband says, so use your judgement and your taste for proportions:

About half a stick of butter

a few cloves of garlic

a couple small zukes or one big one, shredded

a bunch of fresh basil

parmesan or romano cheese

Sautee everything but the cheese, throw it over a pound of pasta and grate a bunch of cheese over it.  The yumminess here does come from the glutteny, so don't be shy with extra butter, some olive oil, lots of garlic and basil, depending on what you like.

We also shred zukes with lots of basil and freeze it in quart-sized freezer bags so we can eat this all year long!

A Bonus Use of Zucchini:

No matter how good we are about harvesting zukes daily, we always end up with those hidden mosters no one can eat....no one but the chickens and the turkeys.  Our oldest son recently got a potato gun from a friend. This is a plastic gun that you stick into a potato, making a little potato pellet, then shoot it off.  We now send Luca off with his Zucchini gun and huge zucchini and he sits in front of the chickens and turkeys, firing off food!  It entertains his little sister and brother too, so it's a HUGE bonus for me!