Stopppin’ by the roadside…
It’s August and all the world’s a fruit stand.
Well, a fruit and vegetable stand, a vegan paradise if you will. And a real hazard to driving a two-lane blacktop out in the country. It’s the time of year that country stands pop up like dandelions in May, and you never know when the guy driving ahead of you is going to hit the brakes because he’s decided it’s time to buy squash.
Or tomatoes. Or cukes, green peppers or sweet corn. Never zucchini though, nobody buys zucchini. Everybody knows somebody giving away zucchini.
For a fellow endowed with a hearty appetite this time of year is better than Christmas … way better. No cards to send, no trees to trim and lots of folks giving me stuff I actually want.
Like home grown tomatoes.
I envy people who manage to grow big, red, tomatoes. Tomatoes bursting with juice but still intact and unblemished at picking time. For years I made the annual garden center pilgrimage, selected promising plants of varied varieties. I planted, fertilized, weeded and watered. Foliage grew dense and green, blossoms burst brilliant yellow, a bee smorgasbord that paid off in growing green orbs, full of promise – and the spores of their own destruction. Just as it appeared a bountiful bumper crop was on the vine the vine went into a terminal droop. With luck, I managed a few fried green tomatoes before the whole she-bang went to compost and I was in line at the farmer’s market with the rest of the landless peasants.
So I quit trying to grow tomatoes. I grew begonias instead. With much better results, except begonias aren’t much good to eat … at least not to my taste.
But I have friends who grow tomatoes. Successfully. Really successfully. Since they have more than they need. More than they could possibly eat. More than they care to can, freeze, chop into salsa, render into pasta sauce or throw at passing stray cats. So they give some to me. For which I am extremely grateful.
They often toss in a few surplus cukes and a spare green pepper or two. Also deeply appreciated.
Of course, this obligates me to accept the zucchini.
Not that I have anything against zucchini. Of all the commonly grown vegetables routinely encountered, zucchini is among the least offensive. It’s essentially tasteless, odorless, and possessed of a most innocuous texture – raw or cooked. Like the shy kid everybody vaguely remembers at a class reunion, zucchini sort of fades into the background; all but unnoticed in every dish it becomes part of. Why else would the highest recommendation for a loaf of zucchini bread be “you can’t even tell there’s zucchini in it.”
Consequently, with zucchini, a little goes a long way – or a lot goes a long way, who can tell? You can add zucchini to about anything other than a hot fudge sundae and barely notice it’s there, and if you do notice, you really don’t much care one way or the other. When it comes to foods, it’s hard to find one more optional.
Or, in season, more abundant. Zucchini got wind of the command to be fruitful and multiply and took it to an exponentially higher power. And not only are they prolific in number, the darn things don’t know when to stop growing. Hidden under a low canopy of broad leaves a neglected zuke will gigantify to a dimension where, if split lengthwise and hollowed out it could serve as a dugout canoe for adventurous small children.
No one, however, want’s to eat a small canoe and unlike an oversize watermelon or the pumpkin swollen to gargantuan scale, an overbloated zucchini becomes, not a source of pride and cultivar envy, but a disposal challenge; something, perhaps to be left on the steps of the neighbor whose kids you really dislike.
And if you leave a couple of tomatoes along with it, that would make it all right.