Summer squash season makes me sad. Mostly because there are mounds and mounds of BEAUTIFUL shapes and colors of summer squash all over the place. Why am I sad amidst such a bounty?
Because I mostly hate summer squash. I don't mind it raw, diced up in a salad, diced small and sautéed in a smoking hot pan for a blink of an eye or (duh!) zucchini bread. It's when it is in chunks and cooked until it's soft and watery (I blame the seeds) that I start to hate it. A lot. I loved "
Ratatouille" but do not like the dish.
[Note: based on this recipe, the previous sentence is no longer true.]
A few weeks ago I saw Jacques Pépin make a yellow and green zucchini 'spaghetti'. He cut off each side - down to but not including the seed cores, julienned the planks and sautéed those fast, in a hot pan. I would trust Jacques Pépin with my very life so I thought I'd give it a shot. Now, I don't like wasting food. I use my produce scraps for stock that I will either use immediately or freeze and the only time the scraps go into the compost bin is when the freezer door becomes difficult to close. I save the heels of hard cheese to thrown into soups and stews. I use the water in which I cooked the chickpeas to cook the barley, and then I throw my onion/leek, carrot and celery produce scraps in that to make a broth.
Throwing the seedy cores of a couple of zucchinis into the compost bin? Zero guilt.
I didn't cut my own julienne, I used a Messermeister julienne-ing thingy. Worked like a charm. There are other small tools out there that are advertised as doing the same but this is the only one I've used and I'm happy with it and yes, my mandoline still scares me a little which is why I didn't use that. The Messermeister cut really beautiful, delicate julienne - and it's easier to clean up than the mandoline.
The ones I cut by hand were a little more like linguine but I think would have been just fine. Thinking after the fact, if I had hand-cut them, I might have cut thin slices, down to the core on each side, stacked those and then cut the strips - resulting in a more consistent julienne. The process using the peeler was very, very fast.
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| Messermeister julienne-ing thingy (left) and hand-cut julienne (right) |
Will I make it again? Absolutely. Next time I'll pan-roast some cherry tomatoes too. I think it would taste great hot or at room temperature. Top with shrimp? Tofu? Yes and yes. This has possibilities.
Recipe: Sautéed Summer Squash Julienne with Garlic, Pepper Flakes, Lemon and Shaved Parmagiana
A bonus to visiting when the weather's nice (and it was spectacularly sunny and warm this trip) are frequent, seemingly close enough-to-touch sightings of Mt. Rainier, the surrounding Cascades range and if you're lucky the Olympic range on the peninsula to the west. This shot, taken with my phone as I was about to go into a store, does not do justice to Mt. Rainier. If you live (or have lived) within sight of it, you don't often refer to it by name but just "the mountain".
