Spatula!

It's hard to believe that summer is over.  Pumpkins and butternut squash are ripening in the garden, and will soon be roasting in my oven.  Still, I think fondly, with a wisp of nostalgia at how I spent this summer.
Here's the data.  This summer I:

read 29 books.
taught 90 summer reading classes.
canned 14 quarts of tomatoes.
drank 7 mojitos.
swam at the Quarry 1 time.
butchered 3 chickens.
ate 9 ears of corn on the cob.
co-starred in 3 episodes of Spatula, a new online cooking show.

On the set of "Spatula"

Please click over to Connotation Press to see the Spatula Cooking Show Teaser. Here you will find also find essays by myself and co-star Amanda explaining how we came to be friends, and how we were inspired to do a cooking show.  I am so grateful for the wonderful, creative foodie friends in my life, which is what Spatula is all about.  I hope you enjoy!

A New Way of Looking at Zucchini

I hate August.  Summer is dying, and the garden is exploding with so much produce that I can't see straight over the steamy fog spewing from the pressure canner in hissing spurts.  August is one giant pressure canner in my head (as I prepare for the new teaching term), and even in the atmosphere  (as we've had daily thunderstorms all this week and when I step out my front door its like the steamy inside of a pressure canner.)

The only thing that's  made me feel better in the kitchen is eating raw zucchini ribbons.  It is cliche to discuss the abundance of zucchini right now.  Case in point, last weekend I was a speaker on a local food panel at the Lake Erie Yearly Meeting of Quakers, and EVERY single one of us panelists made a joke about zucchini overload.  Even so, I'm going to discuss zucchini anyway.  This tired, old, boring problem of what to do with summer squash has a simple solution.

Sometimes you only need to change the shape of something to utterly transform it.  My f(F)riends, J (author of this awesome spiritual blog) and his fiance, K  invited me over for dinner last Sunday night.  They served me a raw zucchini salad that was quite like the "salad of raw zucchini, lemon, and toasted Parmesan" that Nigel Slater discusses in Tender I had been reading about one a few days before.  Slater writes, the raw zucchini "had the quality of freshly picked wet walnuts." 

 Rather than cubing it or chunking the zucchini, J and K finely sliced the zucchini.  Wispy threads of noodle-like zucchini flesh are surprisingly juicy, succulent and slightly nutty.  They drizzled the zucchini with olive oil and lemon juice and a heavy grating of Parmesan cheese.  A simple and delightfully refreshing salad that I can't seem to get enough of (though, in my version, I added a sprinkling of  pine nuts and used a vegetable peeler--rather than a mandoline--to get the thinnest slices possible.)

When two similar ideas show up in my life from seperate sources, well, rather than coincidence, I believe that some greater good, some divine force, is working, asking me to stop and pay attention.  Even to something as simple and mundane as zucchini.

 Suddenly, I am MINDFUL of the zucchini now that it has taken on this new shape, taste, and texture.  The dish is light and delicate, and I find that I have to quiet myself to really taken in the understated glory of the subtle, shifting flavors.  I like everything about this dish.  The monochromatic, pale colors are beautiful, the textures, the ease of preparing it.  And then there's the fact that I can eat an entire zucchini like this all by myself.  Then I don't feel so desperate when there are 10 very large zucchinis, sitting in wait on the bottom shelf of my fridge.

A New Way of Looking at Cucumbers

She remembers a phrase from the movie Julie and Julia, that movie about that woman that cooked through Julia Child's entire Mastering the Art of French Cooking: "Baked cucumbers are a revelation."  She holds this thought in her mind, and like Mark Doty suggests in Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, the mind becomes a Magic 8 Ball.  That plastic toy with the floating marble inside of it that gives answers "yes" or "no" or "ask again later."  Doty says,

"Now I think there is a space in me that is like the dark inside that hollow sphere, and things float up into view, images that are vessels of meaning, the flotsam and detail of any particular moment.  Vanished things.” 

In the heat of July, with a pile of cucumbers, things float into her brain.  "How can I ever possibly eat this many cucumbers?"  The dark solution in her brain sloshes.  "Baked cucumbers are a revelation."  She decides--even though it is 95 degrees outside--to stoke the oven.  The oven, dependable and stubborn, turns the kitchen into an inferno, a wall of heat that can be walked into.  She doesn't mind.  She crams the oven with a roasting chicken, long-skinny Japanese egg-plant, chunks of beets, and after drying them off with wads of paper towels, the cucumbers.

This dinner, it can't exist on any other day, or any other time.  When six pounds of cucumbers arrived in the weekly vegetable box, when the eggplants in the garden reached the heavy purple enamel sheen of ripeness, when the beets heaved their round shoulders out of the soil.  While the chicken and vegetables roast, she makes mayonaise.  Whisking egg yolk and oil, to a thick creamy dollop, studded with shallots and flecks of dark yellow lemon zest.


She thinks, in her lifetime, she's eaten dozens of cucumbers.  But never baked. Never warm.  Dispatching the pile of cucumbers, makes her feel effiecent.  As if she has somehow arrested decay and age, stopped time for these cucumbers in the oven.

Now they are something else.  When they emerge from the oven they are firm, but yielding.  Sweet, but slightly bitter.  Richly coated with butter.  They are not a revelation, exactly.  They are more than the sum of their parts, and startling in how the ordinary has been rendered unfamiliar and strange.

She drags a forkful of chicken across a slick of mayonnaise, chews.  She takes a bite of cucumber, and she wonders about all these things as the roasted beets bleed across the plate, and the eggplants wait patiently in the kitchen to be turned into baba ganoush.  She wonders about the ordinary turning unfamiliar.








** Julia Child's recipe for Baked Cucumbers has been reprinted here.