12 Delicious Ways to Eat Summer’s Most Underrated Vegetable
These recipes will make you love zucchini
Zucchini is probably summer’s most underappreciated — maybe even downright disrespected — vegetable (OK, technically, it’s a fruit). It’s abundant, nutritious, and cheap — all good qualities — but there’s something about zucchini’s intensely mild flavor and the challenge of coaxing out its taste and texture that frustrates us. Plus, anyone who’s experienced the unrelenting wave of zucchini and other summer squash that comes in most CSAs will tell you that it can get hard to come up with new and exciting things to do with it.
So…here’s zucchini, 12 ways, to actually celebrate the fact that zucchini has a lot going for it. It’s firm enough to stand up to all cooking methods, tender enough to eat raw, quick-cooking, and amenable to all kinds of flavors. Major bonus: Zucchini maintains firmness and freshness longer than any of the more beloved summer vegetables.
The recipes here cover my four favorite zucchini cooking methods, two (grilling and sautéing) that are likely very familiar, and two (microwaving them and leaving them totally raw) that are maybe a little less common. The microwave thing may sound strange, but it produces zucchini that’s wonderfully silky and tender and comes in handy when the weather really gets warm…
