Thursday, June 4, 2009

Squash and Zucchini Fool

I have been a squash and zucchini (and some others) fool in the past week. We harvested crooked neck and scallop squash, zucchini, sugar snap peas, and onions. Yesterday we picked our first acorn squashes and we got to get ready for tomato and pepper 'attack' probably next week. Here's what we've done with the crops, besides consuming them fresh and blanching/freezing.

Drying sliced zucchini. It's the most time and energy consuming process. It messed our convection oven's brain for 2 days. We set the oven to 125F / 51C on dehydrator mode. After 14 hours, I decided to stop the process although they were not crisp / brittle yet. I stored them in a vacuumed plastic bag. It can be used for cooking later, or maybe do deep fried zucchini.



Making zucchini bread. One recipe (yield 2 loafs of zucchini bread) is called for only 2 medium size zucchinis. It tasted very good (I used Paula Deen's recipe) and we enjoyed it, but in terms of zucchini usage, it didn't help much.
The recipe.

I  made 2 recipes and grated 4 medium size zucchini.

The zucchini bread in muffin shape.


Making scallop squash casserole with crab meat.

Scallop squash.

The casserole. It was real good, used a one-day crop.


Making a summer provencal vegetable tart.

The creamy tart topped with pan roasted fennel, onion, 
carrot, squashes, and zucchini. All veggies are homegrown.
It is good eaten cold, too. Good in hot summer days.

Finally, the recipe that requires most zucchini and some of our onion, pickled zucchini. Two pounds / 1kg of julienned zucchini (about 8 zucc.) per recipe, and I made two recipes. This brought our stock down to manageable amount. We share some with our friends and neighbors too.

The pickle before canning. Yield 4 three-cups jar.


Not only that, we have been dealing with sugar snap peas and onions too.

Green peas. Blanched and ready to be frozen.

Red and white onions. Washed and ready to be stored.
We sealed them in vacuumed bag and refrigerate.


Yup.. we've been eating fresh and healthy here!

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