Zucchini's Versatility

I love to cook, i learn a lot of my cooking from my mother and my grandmother by being in the kitchen and observing them. I never went to any cooking school, so the recipes that I know how too prepare are basically the ones that I observed from someone cooking or baking in the kitchen. Our family doesnt use zucchini very often, or I dont remember my mother or grandmother using zucchini at all, thats why I am not familiar with the vegetable.

Few months ago, we went to a store and buy cucumber seedlings because we love fresh salads and we put thin sliced cucumber in our salads. I dont know what happened because the supposed to be cucumber plants that we bought in the store ended up being zucchinis, and I have zero knowledge about cooking zucchinis at that time. We also realized that we got the huge zucchinis too, the ones that grow 12-14 inches long and 4-6 inches in diameter. Maybe what happened is that someone unknowingly or accidentally swapped plant labels in the store? I could only guess!

Weeks went by, before we know it, we ended up with so many zucchini harvests, 8 to 12 zucchinis in one day harvest and with how huge they are, its a lot of zucchinis for a family that dont eat a lot of it, or dont know how to cook one. Inorder not to waste any of it, we gladly give some for free to friends and neighbors. I also checked online to see what are my options to prepare zucchinis. And I found out that its commonly use around the US for cooking. You can just slice them and put them in the barbeque as side dish for your barbequed meat. Others dip them in batter and fry sliced zucchinis. You can also cubes zucchinis and put them into your meat vegetable recipes, or slice them diagonally and put them in your chow mein recipe. You can also made bread out of zucchinis! My favorite new finding is making zucchini cake, they are suprisingly good, not to mention healthy too!

Zucchini plant requires a little bit of space to grow because they crawl into the soil and branch more leaves. How they mature reminds me of a centipede, the main stem grow longer and crawl into the surrounding soil and have bunch of leaves branching all over it (main stem). A zucchini leave is quite huge, they resemble the size on an elepant ear plant, which can grow around 12 to 14 inches. I am not sure if its just me, or its really known that the pipe-like stems of a zucchini can be really itchy because of all the spikey fibers in them. So after messing with zucchini plants, I have to wash my hands, arms, and legs with soap right after.

A zucchini plant produce a deep yellow flowers as the zucchini vegetables are developing. The yellow flower is kind of nice and big, see photo above for the flower shot. In the beginning, my first encounter of zucchini is a surprise and accidental, but its versatility and all its many uses in the kitchen, i am confident we are going to have it more often in the kitchen than we ever did before, and its probably going to be one of the regular vegetable that we will be using nowadays. What about you? Do you eat zucchinis?

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