Long Live The Zucchini

It's the middle of August, and if you're a certain type of person -- the type who attends farmers markets and talks about "food systems" and reads five different cooking magazines each month -- it's a very special time for food. That's because corn, tomatoes, peaches, plums, and zucchini have hit the farm stands with a vengeance, and we can all finally stop pretending that we're satisfied with our local selection of dandelion greens, pole beans, baby lettuces, stinging nettles, and the like. The heavy-hitters are finally here. It's all very exciting.

This also means that right about now, Yuppie Foodies (Yoodies? No. Fuppies.) are working themselves into a lather over all this August produce (especially the heirloom tomatoes -- ohhh, do fuppies LOVE their heirloom tomatoes), feasting on it with an enthusiasm that borders on mania. This one can't help working into every conversation how she gets just the best sweet corn at a little roadside stand in Quogue; that one will tell you that her community garden is putting out so much zucchini that she can't give it away fast enough.

The moral of the story is that for this four week period when every farmer's market is bursting at the seams with such primo local offerings, those fruits and vegetables are king. Don't bother cooking with anything else.

Rewind to this past weekend, when we had seven friends over for Sunday dinner. It was meant to be a barbecue (in the Yankee sense of the word) but the weather had other ideas. So, we sent The Viking outside to cook strip steaks in the rain and sat inside drinking cold beers, eating bruschetta, and clumsily decanting a Double Magnum of 1996 Barberesco that The Viking had been given as a gift. There have been worse Sundays.

I wanted to incorporate lots of fresh, local produce into the dinner, and my rule of thumb is that the less you do to tamper with these things, the better.

I made a salad of roasted corn, tomato, avocado, and cilantro, simply dressed with a splash of lime juice.



I also did a second salad of thinly shaved zucchini (I shaved it on a mandolin, but you can do it with a vegetable peeler or knife), toasted pine nuts, and chopped basil, tossed in olive oil and lemon juice and topped with some fresh Parmesan (pictured at top).

For dessert, I cut up a quart of local plums, mixed them with brown sugar and cinnamon, rolled them up in tin foil and stuck them under the broiler. I served them, bubbling and juicy, with homemade pound cake and vanilla ice cream.