Squash Salad

In the summer here in Texas there is an abundance of squash - zucchini, yellow squash, crook-neck, 8-ball and a host of others. Our trip to the farmers' market on Saturday yielded some nice, firm zucchini - about 6" long each. Zucchini can be annoying to cook - all that water has to be driven off before they will brown - and then all of a sudden they are black. If you don't drive the water off, they are all limp and mushy - almost able to be sucked through a straw. Am I making them sound appetizing yet? I thought not.

Then I saw this thing advertised. It is a spiralizer. Once you get past the "gluten free" hype and stop trying to pretend that strands of zucchini are pasta, the idea is quite handy. The tool is unnecessary - at least for this dish. A good old-fashioned vegetable peeler is all you need. But the spiralizer did spark some thinking.

The secret to this dish is your choice of olive oil. It would be revolting with a neutral tasting oil. We used a California Koroneiki oil, an oil with lots of peppery notes and a silky, buttery mouth feel.

Ingredients (2 Servings)

4 medium sized zucchini

16 cherry tomatoes, halved

1 T capers, rinsed and drained

A few sprigs lemon thyme, leaves only chopped finely

A few glugs of high quality, peppery extra virgin olive oil. Probably 1/4 cup

Juice of 1/2 lemon

Kosher salt to taste

Coarsely ground black pepper to taste

1 avocado diced into 1/4" pieces

Crunchy sea salt for finishing

Method

Peel the zucchini, and then slice into ribbons length wise using the vegetable peeler. Discard the core where the seeds are.

Add the tomatoes, capers, lemon thyme, olive oil and lemon juice to the zucchini slices in a bowl and toss to coat. Add the seasoning salt and pepper to taste, and toss again.

Place 1/2 the avocado onto each plate. Mound the squash salad over the avocado. Sprinkle  some coarse salt on the surfaceof the salad. Frind some pepper onto the plate to make it look interesting, serve immediately

Casserole or Gratin

Whether you call a dish a casserole or a gratin may rather depend on whether you like it or not. Needless to say there is some history around tonight's offering. A whole lot of unrelated events combined to make this a must do.
First, there had been the threat of cold weather and we had a massive amount of basil. Needed to get it in so it wouldn't go to waste. I made basil oil from it. Second, we had some stale bread - no surprise there given the amount we make. Third, Fine Cooking came and it had some gratin recipes. Fourth. Madame has said that she would like more veges. 5th, we had some zucchini, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and onions left over from a farmers' market trip.
Now making vegetable gratins is a bit of an art. because the veges can have a lot of water, it is possible to end up with a rather sorry puddle of water with some limp vegetables lying in it. Now that is a casserole!
The trick for this dish is to roast the watery vegetables first in a pretty low oven - not so much for browning, more to drive off some liquid.

Ingredients

3 Tomatoes, chopped into medium dice.
1 sweet potato peeled and sliced very evenly and thinly
1 large zucchini, peeled and sliced more thickly than the sweet potato
2T neutral oil
1/2 yellow onion, thinly sliced and squeezed
1/4 cup heavy cream
6 thyme sprigs
1/2t pepper
1/2t kosher salt
a little adobo from canned chipotles in adobo
1 cup breadcrumbs (freshly made from stale breadmentioned earlier)
3T basil oil
2T chopped parsley

Method

Place the tomatoes, sweet potato and zucchini on an oiled baking sheet, add the thyme, salt and pepper sprinkle with oil and bake at 250F for 90 minutes - uncovered. Just to dry out. When dried, remove from pan, remove the thyme sprigs and place in a bowl with the raw onion. Add the cream, stir and allow to cool so the flavors come together.
About 45 minutes before serving, heat the oven to 450F. Place the vegetable/cream mixture in a grain dish. Warm the basil oil slightly. Combine the breadcrumbs, chopped parsley and basil oil and toss. Sprinkle the breadcrumbs on top of the vegetable mixture. Bake at 450 for about 30 minutes - covering with foil if the top browns too quickly.
Allow to cool for about 10 minutes and serve.

 

 

As you can see there was no nasty pool of liquid. Also, Madame pronounced it delicious (not, "We can serve this to people" delicious though).

Bottom line - definitely a gratin