When Stu went into work on Friday, sitting on a table near his cubicle were orphan zucchini. We’ve all been there, those of us who live anywhere near someone who has a vegetable garden. You’ve all heard the stories of zucchini squash that grew big enough that entire families were able to move out of the school bus they were living in and move into the 4 bedroom zucchini that just showed up in the garden.

When I started gardening lo these many years ago in Berkeley, I too made the mistake of growing zucchini. I liked zucchini. I still do but it was iffy there for a while. One of the first things I discovered was that seed sellers are evil mean bad people because they sell packets of zucchini seeds which is a ridiculous thing to do for a backyard garden-time of person. A packet of zucchini seeds is only useful for agribusiness types, those who have huge tractors and John Deere things to plow the north forty because that’s what you need to grow all these seeds. If you’re a little space/backyard/ weekend because-we-love-tomatoes gardener, you need approximately two zucchini seeds. NOT packages. Two SEEDS. I’ve proposed for YEARS that zucchini be sold “by the seed” in garden shops; you just go to check out and say “oh, yes, and 2 zucchini seeds, please” and they go to the bin and scoop out a few, then count out two into your hand, and put them in a lttiel paper twist, or something.

My first year I planted 6 thinking what the heck. As a first time gardener, I was massively gratified when a seed that I put in the dirt with my own little hands became a little green thing and grew. My god look at what I did! I was a genius, the finest gardener on earth. Everything pretty much took and my first garden which was an experiment, was massively successful. My mother at one point said she could provide me with recipes for all my extra tomatoes ad I said “what eez theese “Extra” of which you speak?” Because there was no such concept; every tomato was lucky to make it as far as the kitchen. I grew tomatoes and green beans and peas, and chives and thyme and oregano, and cucumbers (cute little round yellow cucumbers, aka “lemon cucumbers” based on appearance only, not taste – to save space) and lettuce and parsley and I don’t remember what else. Oh yeah. Zucchini. The six starts I started started to grow and I could not bear to trash any one of the cute little things. So we had zucchini. Lots of it.

At the time I worked at UC Berkeley and I took to sneaking into work early with a zucchini. Each was wrapped in a piece of paper, on which was printed “Attack of the Squash People” by Marge Piercy. It was and it remains a work of poetic genius. (http://www.spoutwood.com/zucchini.html)
Some time later, as I recall, Leslie Turek would post the first few lines and use it to lure people; if you wanted to know how it went, as I recall, you had to come and get a zucchini from her .

Bruce and Annie or someone else in the Revolutionary Garden Party took to attending peace demonstrations with giant missile-like zucchini to which were attached little fake fins. They looked sort of torpedo-ish and the folks in the group would show up with signs reading things like “freeze nukes, not zukes”. We all learned the danger of going out of town for a day or two; perfectly nice squash that was going to be left alone just overnight, would learn there was no one watching and would grow 6 or 9 inches in 24 hours. People would return after a trip to San Luis Obispo, or up the coast to find The Zucchini That Ate The Neighbor’s Terrier.

I’ve heard stories of people “hiding” zucchini in food so I carried around in my head one for years ago, the mother who was caught slipping it into the blender when she made milkshakes for her children. The bad news? She was caught green-handed with the zukes. The good news apparently, though, was that since her kids could no longer “trust” her, they started making their own lunches and she got some time to relax. Smart woman. I wonder still if it was really an accident that they “discovered” her with the squash.

So Stu picks a zucchini to bring home (the littlest one at 10 ½ inches). He knows I know how to cook the stuff and we have a number of groovy recipes for summers squash, which we like, but given that a) this is the size of a cat/large hamster/meerkat, he thought maybe It would be smart to get some new ideas.

I don’t know what I love more. He “googled” “Zucchini Fairy”. Do I love that there were hits when he typed this in? Or do I simply love that this was what he googled? The top hit was an article from the Gilroy (CA) Dispatch – yes, the very same Gilroy that bring you the garlic festival every year – entitled “Gifts from the Zucchini Fairy, complete with some ideas for grilling squash. My fallback recipe is one I essentially snitched from a favorite restaurant in San Francisco after having it there once and have fiddled with endlessly over time. It’s hugely simply – you grate it, you sauté it in a pan with stuff. The stuff usually includes thyme, one of my favorite herbs and one that seems to really like vegetables. While as a kid, I thought it disgusting, that’s due to never having the real thing until I grew it on Sixth Street. I had frozen zucchini as a kid – it does NOT freeze well, and ends up stringy and slimy and ooh, icky, gross. Frozen zucchini is to zucchini as canned peas are to peas. But it really can be a yummy vegetable. It goes with herbs, it goes with cheese, it goes with oils and butters and spices. It works in casseroles and mixed with yogurty stuff and breadcrumb things My one and only Zucchini bread recipe calls for honey as a sweetener and I don’t k now to make it any other way.

Other articles refer as well to the concept of the zucchini fairy. The Zucchini Fairy is not unknown here; Katie may not have realized it but she missed an important American holiday by three days. August 8, after all, is “Sneak some Zucchini onto a Neighbor’s Porch Day” and Katie brought in the little foster family on the 11th. We were recipients a couple of years ago, even if we don’t exactly have a porch. You see, I can’t grow zucchini here.

I know, I know. That’s not possible. I truly am a very good – or was – a ver good gardener, though I can no longer enjoy what used to be a pastime I found enjoyable and therapeutic. But somehow the soil here chez roscoe is so awful that many things do not grow. The most luck I ever had was getting some flowers and then watching a few of them set up and a having a zucchini start and stop growing. Squash borers got to many as well.

Currently our foster squash is sitting the kitchen, secure in its new home. (Cue ominous music). Little does it know…..

(Oh yeah, for our British friends - as far as I can tell, the food we know as zucchini is, in your part of the world, known as “courgette”. I looked up marrow and marrow squash but courgette seems to correspond the best, from all the sites I checked.)