Gardeners' Holidays 2021: The Return of Squashmas

For the past few years, Brian and I haven't had much occasion to celebrate our summer squash harvest. The squash vine borers didn't always kill our zucchini plants outright, but they did enough damage to reduce the expected flood of zucchini to a trickle. So the resulting meager harvest ended up being eclipsed by other crops: cucumbers in 2018, plums in 2019, and tomatoes in 2020. 

Well, we're still getting those things this year; so far, we've gathered nine cucumbers, 53 Sun Gold tomatoes and one Opalka, and a whopping 51 pounds of plums off our Opal tree (with the Mount Royal and Golden Gage plums still left to harvest). But all that pales in comparison to the zucchini crop. Our attempts to fend off the borers with Bt spray proved so successful that, with the two plants in the garden and one in the "burn ward" near the house, we've been practically drowning in squash. What you see here is just a fraction of the harvest to date, which has comprised seven little fingerling zukes, 10 medium, 11 large, and one monster so huge that it took us three meals to dispose of it entirely. 

So for the past week or two, we've been eating zucchini pretty much every day, sometimes multiple times a day. In addition to baking two loaves of zucchini bread (one to eat and one to freeze) and making multiple batches of the zucchini pasta aglio olio (with olive oil and garlic) from Vegetariana, Brian has started sneaking zucchini into as many of our other standby recipes as he could think of. He has served it up in a stir fry with Soy Curls and Thai basil. He has turned the Savory Corn Cakes from Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven into Savory Zucchini Cakes. He has eked out the grated potatoes in his Skillet Kugel with as much grated zucchini as he could stuff in there — plus a little bit more, slightly compromising the structural integrity of the dish. And not once but twice, we have breakfasted on Zucchini Waffles, topped with our homemade plum jam, which proved to be an even better complement for the dish than the orange syrup we tried originally.

But at present, Brian's favorite way of preparing zucchini is to grill it. He cuts the zucchini into quarters lengthwise (or, if they're really big, cuts it once crosswise first to make eight pieces), then marinates them in a mixture of soy sauce, onion and garlic powder, olive oil, and a touch of sesame oil for anywhere from five minutes to an hour. Then he pops them on the grill, accompanied by some sliced onions and potatoes, and cooks them until tender. For protein, he usually adds a couple of veggie burgers, soy dogs, or perhaps some tofu skewers.

With all these zucchini recipes at our fingertips, we can celebrate the return of Squashmas in style. We started off the day with zucchini waffles, and we'll be feasting on grilled zucchini (along with its friends) for dinner. And if I really want to do justice to the occasion, maybe I'll pull that second loaf of zucchini bread out of the freezer and have a slice for dessert.