Snake charmer

Pasta for one

My husband has flown the coop this week to escape the heat by circumnavigating Lake Superior.  I am escaping the heat by going to my lower-level studio, where it's always ten degrees cooler just by walking down the flight of stairs.  But that leaves me fending for myself in the kitchen.

Whenever you cook for one there's a temptation to cut corners, get by with a minimum of preparation (and that usually means a minimum of nutritional value, if you don't count a pint of ice cream straight out of the container).  But I'm trying to eat my vegetables and fix real food this week.  Here's my one-pot pasta meal -- no more dirty dishes than opening a can of Campbell's soup, and a lot tastier.

Start with a saucepan, just as if you were fixing Campbell's soup.  I had half a red pepper in the fridge, so I sauted it in a bit of olive oil, then added the dry pasta and liquid to cover it.

Hot water is fine; chicken broth or wine is even better.  Cook at a bit less than a boil until the pasta is almost done.

At the last minute I added some zucchetta sliced very thin, and then the coup de grace -- some leftover pesto.  Pesto always needs a fair amount of liquid to turn it from a paste into a sauce.  The classic method is to get a half cup of liquid out of the boiling pasta pot, then stir it into the pesto.  But since I wasn't boiling my pasta, I just made sure there was plenty of liquid in the saucepan and stirred the pesto in.

A bit of grated cheese to finish the dish off, and it was delicious.

The zucchetta returns!

No matter what we grow or don't grow in our garden, there's always zucchetta, that pale green twisty version of zucchini that we think is so much better in every way.  I've written about it in previous years, because it's such a constant in our summer menus.

And today when we inspected the plant, we found five little guys, ranging in size from five inches to barely one inch.

The tiny one is about to bump into the big stalk above its head and will then turn in another direction.  Sometimes the fruits twist themselves into beautiful helixes so that you really don't want to cut them up.

We're going to have rain today and tomorrow, so growing conditions should be ideal.  Maybe we'll have our first harvest later in the week.

Airport insecurity

At the airport, I cleared the metal detector, put my shoes back on, looked for my bag -- and realized it was still under the X-ray machine with three solemn guys scrutinizing it.  Oh rats.  Sure enough, they had to do a bag check.

I figured I knew what they were looking for --

the small embroidery scissors.  I was ready to politely point out that TSA regulations allow scissors with blades less than four inches long.

But no.  What they found in the bag, and sent back through the X-ray, was this:

Yes, a zucchetta.  Sometimes when they grow too big we've considered using them as clubs, but never thought of them as TSA-certified deadly weapons.

Zucchini 2.0

So everybody knows about zucchini (Italian for "little squash") but hardly anybody knows about zucchetta (also Italian for "little squash") -- which happens to be one of our favorite vegetables to grow.  We've never seen it in a store or farmer's market.  Think zucchini, except with a pale green skin instead of dark green. I think of it as zucchini 2.0 because it's improved in so many ways over the version we all know and sometimes love.

First, it's prettier than zucchini.  Zucchetta is a long squash, and it likes to curl itself into strange shapes if it encounters even the slightest obstacle as it grows. 

But on to more substantive advantages.  Zucchetta has a slightly firmer texture than zucchini, and it keeps that texture even if you cook it a little too long, never turning to mush the way zucchini can.  I think it has a better flavor, a bit nutty. And all the seeds are confined to a two-inch bulbous area at the flower end, leaving the long neck of the fruit totally free of seeds, perfectly white and firm.

Look, Ma, no seeds!!

Zucchetta is fine raw, to put in salad or blend into gazpacho.  And it's great cooked because of that firm texture.  We like it sauteed as a side (hot or cold) or as an ingredient in panini, slipped into lasagna or baked pasta, or put into soup (it's the pale green vegetable in the title picture at the top of this page).

The only drawback to growing your own zucchetta is that it does like a lot of real estate.  We let the long vines grow out onto our driveway, which makes it easier to walk around and see new fruits lurking under the leaves.  Also the plant doesn't get muddy when it sits on concrete instead of dirt.  Too late for this year, of course, but if you're intrigued by this lovely squash variant, you can order seeds for next year from Pinetree Garden.