Before those little green zucchinis start landing on your doorstep, be sure to stoke your recipe arsenal.
In the 1970s, a bumper crop of zucchini was most often turned into quick bread and considered just shy of health food. James Beard even shares a recipe in "Beard on Bread," suggesting cooks could use whole-wheat flour in their breads, but they still contained prodigious amounts of sugar and vegetable oil.
Its seemingly bland, tofu-like qualities may have led American cooks to consider baking the squash into cakes, cookies and muffins. But in most countries zucchini is treated as a vegetable. The French showcase zucchini in ratatouille, a tasty vegetable stew.
The Kansas City Star's Zucchini Soup offers another way to celebrate the flavor of summer without adding sugar and fat. The creamy soup is added to a base of low-salt chicken broth and flavored with the heat of a jalapeno and the fresh, pungent licorice-like flavor of basil.
Shopping (growing) tip: The smaller the zucchini, the thinner the skin and the more tender the flesh. Look for zucchinis no longer than 8 inches in length. Mature zucchini can balloon to the size of a caveman's club _ a size to which my dad enjoyed growing them. But this is not the time to go for a produce entry in the Guinness World Records book. The flesh becomes too seedy and unappealingly fibrous.
Cooking tip: This recipe can be pureed in a food processor, but this might be a good excuse to buy an inexpensive immersion blender.
