Gad Zukes! It's Time for Zucchini Bread!

Zucchini by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

When life gives you zucchini, you don't have much time to muck about. You can make zuke soup, Mollie Katzen's ZuCanoes, ratatouille, and zucchini bread, but you better be fast because fresh zucchini only lasts a few days before shriveling to primordial ooziness. Here's a zucchini bread that yielded two loaves, one big, one small. The large one made breakfast toast for a week. The baby loaf made the kids at work happy for about 10 minutes. Then they asked what I would bring tomorrow. Something about orange scones...

Zucchini Bread by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

Zucchini Bread

adapted from "Bon Appetit, Y'all" by Virginia Willis

1 cup canola oil

3 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 cup sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cinnamon

3 eggs

1 tablespoon vanilla

4 zucchini, peeled and grated, yielding 2 cups

1. Preheat the oven to 350. Grease two loaf pans with baking spray or cooking oil. I used one medium and one small loaf pans, you may do well with just one large loaf pan.

2. In a bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients, whisk together.

3. In a measuring cup, place the oil, eggs and vanilla and stir together.

4. Add the wet to the dry mixtures, stirring just until combined. Pour the batter into the prepared pan(s).

5. Bake until golden brown, with the cracked spine along the top, about one hour. Transfer to a wire rack to cool for about five minutes, then turn out of the pan. Keep at room temperature, well-wrapped, for a few days.

Summer's Best Stew: Ratatouille



Ratatouille and creamy grits by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books



I've returned to the kitchen, my source for solace in the late summer. The light through the window is changing, it's amber coming through at a different angle, backlighting the spider web on the porch.

Spider web by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

My soul seeks comfort food, but my warm house isn't quite ready for day-long braises and Dutch ovens bubbling over with stewed chicken and bready dumplings. Ratatouille, thick with chunks of eggplant swimming in fresh tomato, I've found, speaks to my soul and lets me walk away from the table without needing a starch-induced nap.




Eggplants by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books


There are at least two approaches to preparing ratatouille: the one-pot method, where each item is chopped and added to the pan gradually. This yields a tasty, but homogeneous stew. My preferred method requires roasting some of the vegetables, namely the eggplant, to give some textural variety to the final product. My recipe is evolving, first with the boilerplate recipe in the "Gourmet Cookbook," now tweaked by Francis Lam’s primer on Salon.com (previously published at Gourmet.com.) It is, to use Lam’s phrase, so good you’ll want to punch a hole in the wall (but please, don’t, somebody‘s mother will have to fix that.)

Redneck Ratatouille

I tend use whatever quantities of these vegetables I have on hand, given the general guidelines in the recipe. I’ve used roasted Poblano peppers and assorted banana and chili peppers instead of or in addition to the bell peppers. Just be mindful of the heat factor when cooking with the spicy peppers.

2 medium eggplant, peeled and diced into 1-inch pieces

Salt

1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

4 large garlic cloves, peeled and smashed

3 large onions, peeled, halved, each half cut into 4 wedges

2 medium zucchini, peeled and diced into 1-inch pieces

2 medium yellow crookneck squash, peeled and diced into 1-inch pieces

4 large tomatoes, cored and chopped

2 tablespoons tomato paste (optional)

2 bell peppers, cored, seeded and cut into 1-inch pieces

A handful of fresh basil

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.

1. Eggplant prep: follow this step only if you have the large globe eggplants which tend to be bitter. If cooking with the smaller Asian eggplants, proceed to the next step. Set up a colander over a larger bowl and place eggplant in colander. Pour out about a tablespoon of salt onto the eggplant and toss. Let eggplant drain for about 30 minutes.

2. In a large oven-proof pot, preferably one with a lid, pour in all but about 3 tablespoons of oil and turn heat to medium. Add garlic and onion and bring to a bubbling boil. Let cook for about 30 minutes while you prep the remaining ingredients. Don‘t walk away, because, you know, it‘s a pot of boiling oil.

3. Heat oven to 450 and get out a half-sheet pan or a large cast-iron skillet. Pour eggplant and squash and zucchini out onto the pan (you may need to do this in batches), pour remaining three tablespoons oil and some salt and pepper on the vegetables and set in oven to roast for about 30 minutes. You’re looking for a touch of caramelly brown on the edges of the veg, not blackened.

4. Ok, now we have a pot of boiling oil and alliums on the stove and a pan of roasting squash and aubergine in the oven. It’s time to turn your attention to the tomatoes. In a food processor, puree the tomatoes and peppers. Add to the onion and garlic oil and continue to cook for another 30 minutes. Optional: if using tomato paste, you can add it to the pot with the tomatoes and peppers.

5. When tomato/onion/garlic/oil mixture is a rich red color, add in roasted squash/zuke/eggplant. Taste mixture for seasoning, then add salt, pepper and basil.

6. Turn oven to 300 and set Dutch oven with stew inside. Let ratatouille cook for at least one hour, and several more if you can. Remove pot from oven and let cool.

I serve ratatouille at room temperature over a bowl of creamy grits. Other choices are pasta such as rigatoni, or couscous, or polenta.

Text and images copyright 2010, Lucy Mercer.

Food of the (Greek) Gods: Briami

Tomatoes by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

The conventional summertime cooking wisdom is to avoid heating the kitchen, instead creating salads and sandwiches that require little or no actual cooking, such as last week’s Salon Kitchen Challenge for light tomatoes. That approach leads to some fine eating, but every cook knows that the glorious tomatoes of summer sometimes need heat to turn them from nominal to nom nom phenomenal.

Enter briami, Greek roasted vegetables, a concoction of tomatoes, onions, zucchini and potatoes smothered in boo-koos of olive oil, garlic and herbs, then set in the oven to roast to umami-inducing perfection. With zukes and the sometimes addition of eggplant, this dish seems rather ratatouille-like. But that is a vegetable stew, best when the items are cooked separately then combined for a long oven braise. This dish is every bit as satisfying as ratatouille and easier to prepare - everything goes in the oven at the same time, heats up together and fills your abode with the intoxicating aroma of garlic and onion and herbs.

 

On the hottest day of the year, when it's 100+ degrees in the shade of the mimosa and the briami is in the oven, my house smells like heaven - garlic, onion, tomato and basil heaven. The smell is divine, but the best part is (naturally) eating the roasty, toasty tomatoes and vegetables, Parmesan bits and herbs. The tomatoes roast and concentrate and mingle with the oil to create a kind of sauce for the other vegetables.


This dish has many fans and I think it’s because of the combination of potatoes and fresh tomatoes, taken interplanetary with melted cheese and herbs. I use basil, but you could also employ oregano and thyme, and other tomato-friendly herbs from the garden. I'm a fan of lovage, when I can find it, which some describe as having a celery kind of taste.

The recipe is adapted from my friend Evelyn who lives in Athens, Greece, and publishes her recipes at Recipezaar. She uses Greek cheeses like kefalograviera or myzithra, but recommends Parmesan as a substitute.

Briami by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books

Briami (Greek Roasted Vegetables)

 serves 4 as a side dish, two as a main 

4 medium tomatoes, diced into 1-inch pieces

2 zucchini, peeled and diced into 1-inch pieces

1 medium onion, peeled and diced into 1-inch pieces

3 medium potatoes, peeled and diced into 1-inch pieces

½ head garlic, cloves smashed

2-ounce Parmesan cheese, cut into 1/2 inch chunks

½ cup extra virgin olive oil

¼ cup water

Herbs such as basil, thyme, oregano and lovage, roughly chopped

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 425º. Line an aluminum half-sheet pan with foil and spread out vegetables and chunks of cheese. Combine olive oil and water and herbs and then pour over all. Season with salt and pepper and toss until thoroughly coated. Place in oven and roast for at least an hour, stirring every so often, just to monitor that all is cooking evenly. Your house will smell unbelievably good at this point. If your windows are open, expect neighbors to drop by. Small children will ask what you're cooking and will probably beg a sample. Pets will be driven mad by the aroma of garlic.

The oil soaks up the flavorings and the water steams the vegetables. I served this over bow-tie pasta; couscous would be nice as well. If you must have protein, a white-fleshed fish simply prepared would be delicious, or maybe some leftover cold roast chicken or perhaps sausages on the grill.

Leftovers, should there be any, can be turned into breakfast (or lunch or supper) hash. Just chop the vegetables a bit, cook in some water in skillet (goodness knows, there should be enough oil left over). When it is warmed through, crack an egg or two into the bubbling mixture, cover and let fry until desired doneness. You will need to plow the lower 40 after such a meal, but it will be ever so worth it.

Text and images © 2010, Lucy Mercer.

This recipe is adapted from Evelyn/Athens Recipezaar.

Tuesday Night Supper

Here's my Tuesday night menu, using two items from the CSA bag - red, ripe tomatoes and fresh zucchini.

Tomato Gravy with Buttermilk Biscuits

Crispy Bacon

Grilled Zucchini

Pineapple Ice Cream Sandwiches

I tried a new buttermilk biscuit recipe, this time from Treasury of Southern Baking by Prudence Hilburn, one of those books I look through a lot and rarely cook from. Her biscuit technique is interesting - using self-rising flour, buttermilk and lard (I subbed Crisco), she mixes all three ingredients together by hand simultaneously. I need to work on my technique, but the biscuits were indeed tender and tasty.

I topped the biscuits with tomato gravy, which is a perfect pantry meal in the wintertime, using canned tomatoes, but heaven in the summer with fresh tomatoes.

Tomato Gravy

from Gift of Southern Cooking by Scott Peacock and Edna Lewis

2 tbsp. bacon fat
1 cup diced onion
2 large cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 1/2 tsp. dried thyme
1 tbsp. all-purpose flour
1 pound tomato, fresh or canned, peeled, seeded, and chopped into 1/2 inch pieces to yield 3/4 cup
1 cup milk

1. Heat the bacon fat in a heavy nonreactive skillet and add the diced onion. Saute over medium-high heat for 5 minutes, stirring often.

2. Add the garlic, 1/2 tsp. of the salt, the pepper and thyme, and cook for another 5 minutes.

3. Sprinkle the flour over and cook, stirring well, for another 2 minutes.

4. Stir in the chopped tomato and the remaining 1/2 tsp. of the salt and cook 5 minutes longer. Slowly stir in the milk and cream and bring to a simmer. Gently simmer for 5 minutes. Taste carefully for seasoning, adding more salt and pepper as needed. Serve hot.