Botancial recipe - Zucchini pickles

Here in the great midwest, August always means the same thing to gardeners, way too many zucchini. Neighbors, even vegetarians, even starving graduate students, will run and hide if they see you coming with a basket, and they should if you let them grow to more and 7-8" in length. The trouble is that when you're away for a few hours, and the squash go untended, zucchini can grow to the size of torpedoes. After making the obligatory zucchini bread, 6 loaves, out of just one torpedo, best to just admit the error and toss the rest. Even when picked at an optimal size, zucchini have a way of overwhelming you, so for decades now, any zucchini recipe that made something new was given a try, and most have been, well, less than exciting. And that's how it is with recipes, and cookbooks, and the Phactors know because when it comes to exotic cookbooks, containing all those culinary promises of gastronomic delight, we have no will power, and most of those recipes go untried, but every now and then you get a truly remarkable cookbook that yields 4 or 5 really outstanding recipes that get added to your cooking lexicon. My point being that many get tried, and few measure up, and when offering up a recipe to my readers, whose response to my initial recipe offering was rather disappointing, a result that can perhaps be attributed to people being creatures of habit and not willing to readily change their dietary staples, it has gone through a filter and passed the test; something that's really good, really easy, and in this case uses up those excess zucchini. These zucchini pickles don't take long to make, and piled on top of a grilled sausage or hotdog, they are simply outstanding. One small change: add 1 tsp of pickling spices to the vinegar mix for a bit more of a complex flavor. In a recent batch of these pickles, two long, thin green hot peppers were thinly sliced and added to the zucchini and onions for bit of zip; after all when you get that old food processor whirling away, it's hard to stop! Sorry to Mrs. Phactor who had other plans for those peppers, the old two cooks in one kitchen problem. This recipe can also be doubled without any problem. And it also works for cucumbers.

Who rules in the garden?

As someone who was raised by gardeners and who grew up with gardens, it remains a constant source of amazement what some people don't know about gardening. So here is a big rule for gardening: pick your fruits and vegetables when they are ready. Sorry, your garden is not a grocery store or produce stand where you can just buy a cucumber when you desire one. And your garden is not a good place to store produce either. Bascially fruits and vegetables have a relatively short period when they are in prime condition, and that's when you should harvest and enjoy them. This was something Mrs. Phactor had to learn. Her Mother had lowered herself from urban to sub-urban to raise a family, and in those days a grassy lawn that stretched to the margins of the property line was fashionable and not going to be interrupted by anything as rural as a garden. By habit produce came either from the grocery store or a local produce farmer, and this isn't about the qualitative differences, but the practice of only eating some particular produce item, even if in season, only once a week or so. Gardens do generate a certain tyranny over gardeners; fast growing fruits like peas, beans, and zucchini demand that they be picked when ready or you've just wasted your time and effort. In season, the late summer dinner of my youth consisted of sliced tomatoes and sweet corn virtually every night. But eating produce frequently even when in season was an anathema in my in-law's family. So it took a bit of time, no more than a decade or two, for my dearest to learn that the same fruits and vegetables could be eaten often, and in many different ways to break up the monotony (sadly something that even my family could have learned), and were best in their prime condition. So it pains me greatly, when visiting a gardening neophyte, to see things so in need of picking that my hands must remain in my pockets to prevent automatic harvesting. Sometimes you try something diplomatic, and a bit self-serving. "Say, if you're not going to eat those aubergines, may the Phactor consume them?" At a minimum, this calls attention for the need to harvest, and may pay off dividends if they respond, "Certainly you may have them; we ate eggplant last week." And of course, for some fruits, especially the infamous zucchini, waiting one day too long can transform a delicate and delectable 6 inch fruit into a torpedo only suitable for launching into the compost. How much zucchini bread can one person eat? Not enough to keep up with a zucchini in its productive prime.