summer squash

I was going to list all of the zucchini recipes I keep stuffed inside the yellow Whitman's Sampler chocolate candy box I use to store such things, but I loaned the recipes out and I don't have them in hand. There must be twenty of them! Almost all are from the years in the mid 1970s when I was attending school in Pullman, Washington.

Pullman, Washington was unusual in a number of ways, but we'll stick to zucchini tonight - Italian squash. Quite a few people grew vegetable gardens in the short warm summers with long days. The soil must have been ideally suited to zucchini. It only took one or two zucchini plants to be overwhelmed by these long green vegetables. If you picked them regularly at short intervals, you'd have a satisfying supply of trim, manageable squash. But if you got sidetracked by work, studies, other projects in your life, and then said, oh my gosh, I've neglected the garden, you'd be likely to come staggering through the kitchen door, arms laden by zucchini the size of a chihuahua.

So what do you do? There is only so much zucchini one person can consume.

Well - I learned you can give them to friends, and if they say no thank you, you can anonymously leave them on their doorstep. The local grocery, Rosauer's, had recipes printed on index cards. So, no, you didn't have to eat zucchini stir fry every night. There were zucchini omelettes, zucchini and corn casserole, zucchini potato skillet and what not. Friends traded recipes, and you made zucchini bread and chocolate zucchini cake (which is a lot more delicious than perhaps it sounds).

And when all was said and done, there were still more zucchini, until winter hit and it was below zero (that's Fahrenheit), and the stuff inside of your nose froze as you slogged through four feet of snow. But that's a whole nuther story about what made beautiful Pullman so unique -