Here’s a secret they don’t tell you about visiting the country: if you leave your car unlocked – for mere seconds – someone will come along and sneakily dump a 30-pound box of zucchinis in your trunk when you are distracted by a deer.
This makes the Bronx look rather tame.
The other thing they fail to tell you is that there’s a million things to do with zucchini. With our surprise 30-pound box, we dedicated a meal a day for a week to zucchy dishes.
We started ambitiously on a Monday with a zucchini tart, the recipe for which came from our seasonal bible. It’s a base of bread crumbs with vegetables on top and a cheesy egg mixture, which turned out to be a crowd pleaser.
On Tuesday, we had share veggies: mesclun greens with golden beets alongside some local goat cheese and zucchini fritters (egg, a little flower, s&p, fried in butter).
If after a long Wednesday you received tomatoes, onions, garlic, and basil in your CSA… what would you make? It seemed pretty obvious that this was a night for pasta, and so we cooked what we deem ratatouille pasta! Zucchini and summer squash with the fresh tomatoes, onions, garlic, basil, sautéed up with some whole wheat pasta. And the coziest Wednesday night meal was set, to be paired with a Cary Grant movie (“His Girl Friday”).
On Thursday, zucchini bread seemed to be in order. All kinds of variations are plastered over the internet and they’re easy to make. Also, I’ve found that when you give people zucchini breads, they inexplicably love you.
For Friday, a variation on beans and rice with zucchini, tomatoes, shallots, oregano, cumin, and chili pepper.
And on Saturday, another Vegetables From An Italian Garden meal – zucchini pesto! It turned out quite beautiful and impressive (perfect for a Saturday evening first course affair), and while vaguely like pesto, had delicious summer zuch undertones. Highly recommended.

And on the seventh day, we rested.
Aka: ordered take-out. It did not contain zucchini.