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.