The Sagra di Zucchini continues at Casa Morgana as the crop picks up speed, and it’s a race to snare modest sized zucchini before they turn into giants. Zucchini fritters make a very satisfying and economical lunch, but rely on a couple of other key players- abundant herbs and good quality fetta cheese- to push the flavour from bland to gustoso. There are many varieties of fetta available in Melbourne, especially in the Greek delicatessen at fresh markets. At last count, my favourite Supermarket Deli in Brunswick stocked around 12 varieties. As this dish only requires a small chunk, I prefer to use Dordoni fetta, while I’m happy enough to use cheaper fetta cheese in Spanakopita or Tiropita.
Mucever, Zucchini Fritters Turkish style.
700 gr zucchini, coarsely grated
salt
1 bunch spring onions/green onions/scallions white and green finely chopped
170 gr fetta cheese, crumbled
1/2 cup fresh dill, chopped
1/2 cup fresh mint, chopped
1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup all-purpose/plain flour ( try chick pea flour for a GF version)
olive oil for frying.
simple luncheon dish. Mucever.
Place the zucchini in a colander and sprinkle with 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Let it sit for 1 hour to drain. Lightly squeeze out the moisture and dry with paper towels.
Place the zucchini in a large bowl and mix in the spring onions and herbs. Then add the eggs and mix well. Finally sprinkle over the flour and mix. Add salt and pepper.
Heat a large skillet or frying pan containing a thin film of oil. Drop tablespoons of the batter into the oil, spreading them to make thin, small pancakes. Cook until golden brown on both sides.
Serve hot with yogurt and mint sauce.
This recipe is from my favourite cookbook, a battered copy of From Tapas to Meze, by Joanne Weir, 1995.
Throughout Italy, various villages and towns hold an annual sagra or festival, very often dedicated to a specific locally grown or produced food, such as frogs, chestnuts or onions, or a local dish such as frico, polenta or risotto. A quick search of the various sagre in Italy will reveal many festivals devoted to pumpkin but not to zucchini. If you think about it, the pumpkin or Zucca is the Zucchino‘s much bigger sister. Orange versus green. Female versus male, fat and rounded versus thin and elongated. Anything you can do with a pumpkin can be adapted to the zucchino; stuff, fry, bake, layer, grate and soup them. Oh and pickle them too.
Spaghetti con Zucchini, Gamberi e Menta
It’s high time to announce my own Zucchini Sagra. Come along and try my new zucchini recipes this month, or better still, suggest some more unusual ways of using this prolific garden beast.
My first recipe marries some young zucchini with prawns, spaghetti and mint in a rich sauce. The links at the bottom of this post will take you to some of my previous posts on this wonderful annual vegetable.
Spaghetti con Zucchini, Gamberi e Menta Serves four people.
Extra virgin olive oil
3-4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 small zucchini, halved lengthways then sliced in half moon rounds
pinch of crumbled dried chilli
2 anchovy fillets
100 ml dry white wine
40 gr butter
24 large uncooked green prawns
200 gr spaghetti ( see notes below)
16 or so mint leaves, torn
handful of flat parsley finely chopped
sea salt and black pepper
Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil.
Meanwhile add 2 tablespoons olive oil to a large non stick pan over medium heat. Add the garlic and saute for a couple of minutes. Add the zucchini and cook for 2- 3 minutes until coloured. Add the chilli and anchovies, squash them into the oil, then add the wine. Allow the wine to evaporate a little then add the butter. Bring to the boil for a minute or so, then add the prawns, stir about then remove from the heat.
Cook the spaghetti in the boiling salted water until al dente. Drain, then add to the prawns. Pop the pan over high heat, tossing and stirring to combine all the ingredients. Add the parsley and mint. As soon as the prawns are opaque, remove from the heat.
Season with salt and pepper and add a tablespoon of olive oil. Serve.
Spaghetti with Zucchini, Prawns and Mint
Notes.
The amount of spaghetti specified in this recipe would be suitable for an entrée or light luncheon.
I would suggest adding more pasta to the pot, say, around 80 g per person, for a main meal, with a green salad on the side.
I also used a large non stick wok, which is a better utensil to hold the volume of ingredients for the final tossing.
The sauce, made up of oil, garlic, anchovy, wine and butter, is an excellent base for any marinara you might make.
I know what you’re thinking, not another zucchini recipe from Casa Morgana. The zucchini in our garden don’t look like they’re slowing down soon- in fact, they are gaining momentum, so my zucchini repertoire continues to expand. This recipe is based on the famous Melanzane Parmigiana but is made with fresh zucchini instead of eggplant, along with a sauce from their garden team-mate, fresh tomatoes. It is, for me, Italian comfort food at its best, and good when I feel tired. If you don’t have fresh tomatoes, use a large can of tomatoes instead. Start the prep early, given the stages to this homely dish.
Zucchini Parmigiana (Serves 4-6 with salad and a side dish)
Ingredients.
one kilo medium-sized zucchini
a little olive oil
salt and pepper
4-5 garlic cloves, crushed then chopped
one kilo of fresh vine ripened tomato
herbs, either fresh basil or fried oregano
1-2 tablespoons of tomato paste
sliced mozzarella
grated grana padano parmigiano cheese.
grilled zucchini slices.
Choose a kilo of medium-sized zucchini. Cut the ends off and slice them vertically. Don’t cut these too finely as they need to stand up to some intense cooking and hold their shape in the final layering.
Choose a gratin baking dish, either oval or oblong. Butter or oil base and sides.
Grill the sliced zucchini on a stove top ridged griller. When all done, keep aside and season lightly as you go.
Skin the tomatoes, then chop them, removing most of the seed.
Add some olive oil to a saucepan, cook the garlic briefly, then throw in the tomatoes and herbs. Let the sauce simmer and cook down slowly for 30 minutes or more. Add tomato paste to thicken. The sauce should still have some texture, unlike tomato passata.
Begin layering the dish, starting with a little sauce, followed by the zucchini (cut these to size as you go to match your serving dish). Then some mozzarella, then some grated parmesan.
Continue layering in this way until the ingredients are used, finishing with a cheese layer.
Bake in a medium oven, 180c FF for around 20 minutes or until the top has coloured.
Serve with a side dish that will soak up the juices. I chose some orecchiette with a little butter, pepper and fresh basil leaves. Mash is also good or just crusty bread.
Although today marks the start of Autumn, Melbourne is experiencing a late heatwave with temperatures hovering around 33º to 35º ( 91-96 F) for the week ahead, with little chance of rain. The garden, although dry, continues to pump out vegetables at an unseemly rate which sees me trekking off to the supermarkets for pickling vinegar and sugar, as well as opportunity shops for more clean jars. It’s pickling season, a task that always seems to coincide with hot days. Each week I make two batches of bread and butter cucumber pickles. These are popular with all members of the extended family and friends: most are given away.
Bread and Butter Pickled cucumber, an old-fashioned favourite
This is today’s cucumber pick, explaining the surge in pickle production.
Cucumbers galore
After a three-day weekend at the beach, we often return to some rude surprises in the garden. This fella ( yes, I know it’s really a sheila) will not become an ingredient in my kitchen! The seed will be dried out for next year. It weighs 4.76 kilo.
Zeppelin Zucchini Alert
After we settled in our new home, we began planting an orchard. Wendy, a local food farmer, was running permaculture courses in grafting at the time. Most of our heritage apples were supplied by this group at a nominal cost of $1 per pot. We planted around 15 different heritage apple varieties. The cuttings for the grafts were collected from old farms and apple specialists around Victoria and taste nothing like the commercial varieties which are marketed today. Now, 5 years later, the apples are beginning to bear well. The ripening of each variety is staggered throughout the season. Mr Tranquillo, the fruit bat, eats most of them before they get a chance to feature in any cooked dish.
Early apples variety, Rome Beauty.
The chooks never let us down, with enough eggs for us as well as the troupes at the beach, where most are eaten on the weekend.
Morning egg gathering
Last month I met some special visitors from the bloglandia: first, the lovely Julie from Frog Pond Farm visited from New Zealand. A week later, EllaDee, from the Nambucca region of New South Wales, visited for morning tea, accompanied by her husband Wayne. They are travelling around Victoria in her ‘Nanavan”. On meeting for the first time, we continued the conversation we have been having for a year or more: time passed quickly and pleasantly. EllaDee brought tasty gifts from Macksville: macadamia nuts from Nambucca Macnuts and honey and wine from Gruber’s winery. I am working on a special dish using these treasures.
Tasty gifts from Mackville, New South Wales
As the welcome swallows move out from their ‘bespoke’ little nests, their discards often fall to the ground intact and find their way into my home.
A mudbrick home within a mudbrick home
These old tin numbers were found at a ‘trash and treasure’ market down by the Bay and snuck onto my overcrowded kitchen dresser. The other numbers in the set, 9, 6 and 0, were acquired by my daughter in law, Maxine. With these numbers, we can send each other photo scores out of ten, despite the limited range. The area around Rosebud (‘Guns and Rosebud’) specialises in weekend markets. Some sell craft, local vegetables and locally produced foods, others just sell trash.
” He threw back his cloak and he cried with pleasure, One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”
In My Kitchen is a monthly event. I quite enjoy the rhythm it gives to my writing life, with now 26 posts on this theme. I like to look back over the first post of past months and am reminded of similarities and differences in past seasons, as my activity in the kitchen is often defined by seasonal produce. Thanks to Maureen of The Orgasmic Chef, who now hosts this monthly international gathering. Maureen has taken up the reins from Celia, enabling this wonderful meeting of kitchenalia to continue.
I like to eat soups in the height of summer, not necessarily cold soups, but light minestre of vegetables in season. They are thrown together and take around 20 minutes to cook, using whatever is abundant in the garden.
Summertime soup. Keeping photos real with lots of red slurp.
This vegetable soup is similar to the French Soupe au Pistou in many ways, but I am waiting on the garden’s fresh borlotti, i fagioli scritti, and green beans, before I go down that Provençal path.
Ingredients.
1 onion, finely sliced
1 garlic, finely chopped,
2 tablespoons EV olive oil
4-5 chopped Roma tomatoes
1 medium zucchini, finely sliced
1 can of drained and well rinsed chick peas or white cannellini beans
¼ jar of home-made or purchased tomato passata
4 cups vegetable stock
small broken pieces of Mafaldine (flat ribbon) pasta or other dried pasta on hand
salt and pepper
freshly made pesto from a handful of basil leaves, two cloves garlic, salt, olive oil and pecorino, bashed to a pulp in a mortar and pestle. (Leave the nuts out when serving with soup.)
grilled bruschetta to go with the soup.
In a large heavy pot, add a generous slurp of olive oil and gently cook a sliced onion and a chopped garlic until soft but not coloured. Then add the vegetables as listed, stirring each new addition for a minute or so as you go. When they are almost cooked, after around 15 -20 minutes. add the some broken pieces of Mafladine and cook until the pasta is al dente. Season well. Serve in wide bowls with a dollop of freshly made basil pesto.
Pranzo all’aperto. Minestra di verdure estive.
The pasta Mafaldine was named in honour of Princess Mafaldine of Savoy, daughter of King Vittorio Emmanuele 111, and is also known as reginette or “little queens”.
I have been thinking about how to curry favour with my son-in-law as I need a few jobs done and Kyle, a carpenter, is meticulous and super- efficient. Going by the moniker, ‘that tool in the tool box’, a self-inflicted title I might add, Kyle is the man you need when a door doesn’t line up with a wall.
Not Walt from Breaking Bad. Not Kyle the carpenter. It’s Mr Tranquillo tackling a wall renovation.
I know he likes these pickles: I have seen him hoover down a whole jar in one sitting. They are delightfully old-fashioned but on trend. They often appear on a summer ‘tasting plate’ (an annoying term used in Australia for a mishmash of tit-bits on a plate) in some of the more fashionable wineries and restaurants about town. These pickles were popularised by Stephanie Alexander in the 1990s, taken from her seminal cookbook, The Cook’s Companion, a dictionary styled cookbook which has sold more than 500,000 copies to date. Her ‘bible’ sits on the shelf in many Australian homes. My copy is well-thumbed, splattered and stained.
During January and February, when it’s not uncommon to pick one kilo of zucchini a day, I make these pickles often and share the jars around. They make a handsome addition to a ploughman’s lunch, or give a vinegary crunch to a cheese sandwich.
Step 1. Add the sliced zucchini and onion , well salted, to a bowl of water.
Stephanie’s Zucchini Pickles
1 kilo small zucchini, sliced on the diagonal
3 onions, finely sliced
½ cup salt
3 cups white wine vinegar
1/½ cups sugar
1 Tablespoon yellow mustard seed
1 teaspoon dry mustard
2 teaspoons ground turmeric
Step 2. Covered in a vinegar, sugar, turmeric and mustard solution
Toss the zucchini and onion with the salt in a ceramic bowl, then cover with cold water. Leave for one hour. Drain then return to the bowl. Combine the remaining ingredients in a saucepan and stir over gentle heat until the sugar has dissolved. Bring to a boil and pour over drained zucchini. Leave to cool. Use at once or pack into sterilized jars and refrigerate. Use within two months. Makes about five medium sized jars.
Whenever I visit friends who enjoy gardening, the first thing on the agenda is a tour around their vegetable patch and orchard, before we settle down to a cup of tea and a chat. So grab a cuppa or something stronger and take a stroll around my garden for a quick tour. The season has been harsh but things are on the mend.
Bee Attractors- the flowers of Endive lettuce
borage blue
radicchio
radicchio flower
First up we have the tall blue and purple flowering lettuces, my bee and insect attractors and invaluable aid to the continued fertility of all the tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers and fruit trees. The bright cornflower blue flowers of the radicchio, now three metres high, are beacons to bees. The purple flowers of endive lettuce last for months, while the blue flowering borage plants magically appear on the lower levels. These lettuces self sow in early Spring, bolt towards the sky in late Spring and flower through summer. They are a gardener’s best friends.
It’s seed harvesting time. All the main lettuces have gone to seed and have been hulled through my Turkish Celik, labelled and packed. The leek seed is close to collecting and makes an interesting garden specimen. Many species self sow, such as lettuce, radicchio, silver beet, coriander,parsley, tomato, pumpkin, zucchini and cucumber, though not all are retained. The garden beds become depleted quickly when taken over by the same species.
a mixed bag
Pomodori- golden apples
Romas and zucchini
Rouge de Marmande
Roma tomatoes
young tomato
The tomato glut has caught up with the zucchini and it’s time to think about preserving. These golden tomatoes, giving literal meaning to the Italian pomodoro, are lovely sliced on toast or a pizza. The Roma tomatoes are prolific and good keepers, while my favourite, the Rouge de Marmande are still green.
Cucumber flowers through the mulch
As the heat will be with us for another two months, it’s time to apply another layer of mulch and to feed the older zucchini. I use organic sugar cane- it is expensive but goes a long way, and top this with crumbled old cow manure which I soak overnight in a bucket of water. As the zucchini have been productive for over two months now, they need a good feed.
Early morning in the orchard
Last year was a pear year: this year is the turn of the Japanese plum. Hooray. I have waited for Satsuma and Mariposa plums for around four years and at last they have begun. Another week and they are all mine.
Satsuma plumsQuince in hidingTable grapes ripening.
The Garden Diaries this time last year: https://almostitalian.wordpress.com/2015/01/04/garden-monthly-january-2015/
What’s happening in your garden? Do you keep a garden diary or journal?
Here they are again, the summer zucchini growing like triffids, their dazzling yellow flowers opening loudly in the sun, enticing insects to enter, then closing snugly with the tramonto or sunset. Their fruitfulness is always a mixed blessing as most zucchini growers will attest : there are always too many for one household. Catching them while they are discreet in size is part of the game- come back from a weekend away and you’re in for a rude surprise. Big ones sap the energy of the plant, reducing flowering and productivity. The larger zucchini are also rather bland in flavour, a case of bigger not being better! Constant harvesting is wise, as it is with all vegetables. Pick often and be rewarded.
Morning bees busy with cross pollination
Many folk have a swag of favourite recipes for dealing with their annual zucchini glut, I am sure. I have at least 20 standby recipes and am always looking for more. Throughout summer, we use zucchini in:
simple soups,
fried and tossed through pasta alla carbonara
grated and incorporated into fritters, patties and bhajis
combined with cheese into old-fashioned baked slices
gutted and refilled with ricotta and baked in the oven
pickled with mustard seed
grilled to lay on a pizza
substituting eggplants in a parmigiana bake
vinegared with balsamic and garlic
sliced vertically into carpaccio salad
fried with their friends the tomatoes to make Provéncal tians and tarts
grated into breads, muffins and cakes
They are summer’s green gifts. When their day is done, sometime down the track in Autumn, we say Addio for another year.
Zucchini Bhaji with minted yoghurt
Zucchini Bhaji
These little fried morsels are a cross between an onion bhaji and a vegetable pakhora. They don’t last long, and are often eaten as they exit the wok and don’t make it to the table. This recipe would feed two very greedy people or make snacks for four. It can be doubled for a family- kids love them. Different spices may be used, such as cumin or coriander. The batter needs to be thicker than cream but not too stiff.
two medium zucchini, grated
1 onion, finely sliced
¾ cup besan/chick pea flour
¼ cup rice flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teas salt
½ teas garam masala
½ teas chilli powder
1 garlic clove crushed
½ cup or so water
plain oil (not olive oil) for frying
Grate the zucchini and leave in a colander, covered with a weight, for 1/2 hour or so. Slice the onion.
Make the batter by mixing the dry ingredients with the water. Also let the batter sit for 1/2 an hour or more, un refrigerated so that the batter begins to ferment a little.
Add the vegetables to the batter and mix well. Add oil to a wok and heat until a bread piece sizzles. Deep frying is recommended as the fritters stick to the pan with shallow frying and tend to retain too much oil. If the temperature of your oil is hot, the bhaji should fry quickly. Turn once or twice using tongs, and then draining on paper towels.
Serve with Podina Chutney if you have an abundant mint supply, or a mint laced yoghurt dressing.
This snack is gluten and lactose free and vegan. Many zucchini recipes, quite by chance, are.
There were a few surprises hiding in the vegetable garden when we returned from our long sojourn in Indonesia: a crop of zucchini, some small ruby radicchio, herbs, pumpkin, chilli, and a bundle of borlotti beans. I hung on to the last zucchini of the season until the first day of winter. Now we will be zucchini free until next November. Some may say that’s a blessing! Six months of fecundity and benevolence and six months of none. Ci vediamo in primavera.
To celebrate slicing into the last one, I constructed a dish made from my favourite ingredients: fresh calamari, radicchio, garlic, chilli, good olive oil, wine and squid ink pasta. This isn’t a pasta dish as such: the black tangle of pasta gives a little more body to the dish but doesn’t dominate. The following recipe is an attempt to quantify a spontaneous dish. And, given the absence of winter light, my photos are hazy and dull.
Winter Zucchini and Calamari Mescolanza
Zucchini e Calamari Mescolanza (serves two)
two tablespoons EV olive oil
half a medium zucchini, very finely sliced
2 fresh calamari, cleaned then sliced thinly *
radicchio leaves to taste, shredded roughly
2-3 garlic cloves, chopped
one fresh hot chilli, chopped finely
one handful of black squid ink pasta (about 60 gr)
white wine
salt, black pepper
Method
Cook the pasta in salted boiling water. Drain, retaining a little cooking water.
Meanwhile, heat oil in a large frying pan. You need a lively heat as this is a fast dish.
Add the zucchini slices and toss well till lightly coloured and very soft.
Add the garlic and chilli, toss well.
Add the finely sliced calamari, cook for around two minutes only, tossing as you go.
then add the shredded radicchio leaves and toss for a one minute.
add a good slurp of wine, reduce a little, then add the pasta to the pan, add a little cooking water, reduce, then season.
Serve in wide, heated bowls.*
Notes
* A good fish monger should clean the calamari for you. Don’t bother using the rubber tubes from the supermarket. They will spoil a good dish. Fresh squid is a good substitute and more economical. Don’t throw out the wings. Freeze them and add to another dish later, such as a pasta or risotto marinara. Read the following recipe from Sandra at Please Pass the Recipe for an economical approach to using seafood scraps.
* Why wide heated bowls? I never used to heat plates and bowls when I was working full-time and coming home to cook for five or more. Since then, I have adopted bowl heating as a matter of course, particularly for pasta, soup and risotto. Imagine making a lovely hot dish and then plonking it into a freezing bowl? The temperature of the food cools almost immediately, whereas a hot bowl acts as a food warmer for the duration of the meal.
For my son Andrew, who recently commented about the heating of bowls, thinking that his mother had finally turned totally anal and lost the plot. He may be right!
My orto needs some serious attention. Some remaining Autumn crops are happy to linger longer and fatten up. Other beds need digging over, re- seeding and mulching. The rabbits got in and munched all my lettuce, parsley, radicchio, rocket and coriander! Some one left the gates open while I was at the beach. This invasive pest (the rabbit, not the gate person) also finds a way through our Fort Knox fencing during Autumn, especially when it’s really dry and the green pickings are slim in the paddocks and bush. The kangaroos are also desperate, jumping the fences to dig up the remaining vestiges of green grass around the veggie patch. They have also taken a fancy to apple trees. This is unusual behaviour as only wallabies tend to be so destructive. Too many jobs, not much will or time.
Now for the happy news. The eggplant are ripening and so long as the frost stays away, they should continue for a while.
We also have belated borlotti beans. I tried to plant these in December but they couldn’t cope with the blasting heat. I re-seeded some in late February and the mild weather seems to suit them. Again, stay away Jack Frost.
We have had zucchini crop continuously for five months now. I am happy not to buy any after their demise. We harvest a few each week.
Some self-sown lettuce popped up with the latest rain. I usually relocate them when they are a little older and not deplete the soil of the same nutrients.
It has been a wonderful year for pumpkin and other cucurbits. They liked the milder weather and scrambled all over the garden. They need a few more weeks to ripen and harden in the remaining sun.
It’s also time to make a few basil things for the freezer- basil butter and frozen pesto ‘bombs’ which will bring a touch of summer to a winter soup.
To do list this week:
Remove remaining bird nets from strawberries and raspberries
make basil butter and basil oil
investigate products in Australia for frost protection of limes and lemon grass.
make a small mix of concrete to plug rabbit holes in fence
collect more cow manure and spread about
sow turnips – such an easy crop
cut back herbs
bake remaining apples and the lone quince!
Are you a keen food gardener? Do you grow herbs, vegetables or fruit? Do you need assistance or advice to get you started? Go and check out the other posts this month at Lizzie’s Garden Share Collective.
ALMOST ITALIAN 
