zucchini abounds

Post-vacation garden harvest

It's that time of the year (and has been for a while) when your neighbors start to ask "Can I give you some zucchini?" and you run away screaming.

We planted four zucchinis, and at first it seemed like the perfect amount. Every day, we had one or two on-the-small side squashes, perfect for sautéing with green beans as a dinner side. But for the last few weeks, we've been so overrun that I'm now avoiding peeking under the umbrella-like leaves at all.

Upside, I've settled on a zucchini bread recipe. The first two I tried were just not right--even my usual favorite people at America's Test Kitchen didn't win me over in the end with their attempt to better old-school zucchini bread recipes by toning down the amount of oil and nixing such add-ons as cinnamon, nuts, and chips. The result? Bread that was too light and flavorless, I thought. Boring.

I rediscovered the winning recipe thanks to my mom and a 1970s-era church cookbook. This one brings on the vegetable oil, cinnamon, nuts, and chocolate, and manages to be moist and light at the same time. The spices and add-ons give the zucchini the helping hand it--let's be honest--really needs. Because the irony of zucchini bread is that it's not about the zucchini. At least, that's what I've decided after a double batch of it cleaned me out of flour, sugar, eggs, and chocolate chips, and made barely a dent in our pile of squash. The zucchini is merely an excuse to consume slice upon slice of chewy chocolatey nutty cinnamony quick bread with morning coffee.

Now that our freezer is stocked with loaves, I'm trying other things to conquer the pile. Zucchini blanched and frozen. Zucchini in vegetable soup. Zucchini soup puree. Zucchini slices baked with bread crumbs and parmesan. And, because it's a losing battle, zucchini for the chickens. They love it!

Zucchini Bread 
Adapted from Westminster Presbyterian's 1970s cookbook 

I prefer to use zucchini that's over 1 pound here--save the smaller ones for stir-fries or salads, as they're moister. The larger ones are dryer, which is better for this bread.

2 1/2 cups grated zucchini
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
3 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped nuts
1 cup chocolate chips

Toss the zucchini with 1 tablespoon of the sugar and set in a fine-mesh sieve over a bowl. Let the zucchini drain for about 30 minutes--you'll be left with greenish water beneath and much dryer zucchini. Squeeze the squash with paper towels to sop up any excess moisture.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F and prepare a loaf pan or a muffin tin by oiling the bottom and sides, then dusting with flour. Alternately, use parchment paper or muffin cups.

Cream the remaining sugar and eggs; add the oil and zucchini. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Stir the wet and dry ingredients together until just combined. Add the nuts and chocolate and stir.

Pour into the prepared loaf pan or muffin tin. Fill the loaf pan about two-thirds of the way full; fill the muffin cups about halfway full.

Bake a loaf for 1 hour or muffins for 25 minutes, until the tops are more golden than glossy and a toothpick stuck in the middle comes out clean. Let the bread rest in the pans on a cooling rack for about 7 minutes. Then remove and let cool all the way (or, okay, as long as you can wait).

You can freeze the loaves wrapped in plastic wrap, then tinfoil or butcher paper.

i am not a canning person

My summer canning marathon is over, and I now remember how much I do not like canning. I forgot in the eleven months since my last canning marathon. Mostly because those months were accented by yummy canned goods: sweet cucumber relish folded into salads, cardamom plum jam smeared on toast, tomato sauce spooned over pasta. My efforts last summer, which included one epic weekend where I think I did seven different canning projects, were, okay, totally worth it. We gave pickles and jam as Christmas gifts and brought them as host gifts, shared them with family and friends, and just finished the last jam a few weeks ago.

This weekend, while Tim was across the country for a friend's wedding, I decided to revisit some highlights--hot-cumin zucchini pickles, dilly beans, and sweet cucumber relish--as well as some sweet cucumber pickles that our landlords served once and I've been dreaming about ever since. I made it to the jar-filling stage of my first project, the relish, when it all flooded back. Oh no, I do not like canning at all. It's the water-bath canner on the stove hissing hurry up as I pack the jars; the millions of precise steps in the recipes shouting you forgot, you forgot; the sneaky jar lifter slipping its grip and whooping ha!; the heat in the kitchen stickying my skin. 

Maybe I spent too much time with canning equipment this weekend. 

As I relayed my frustrations to Tim on the phone midway through the marathon, he said, "Maybe you are not a canning person." And something clicked for me. I actually felt relieved. He is right. I am not a canning person. 

Sure, I will probably continue to make a few small batches of pickles and dilly beans and relish each summer. How can you not when you have eleven pounds of cucumbers languishing in the fridge? I will probably try new canning recipes, too, because I always fall for the romance of new recipes and home-preserved self-sufficiency. Come rainy November, I will definitely be delighted to crunch into a dilly bean and might even feel nostalgic for steamy nights spent slaving over the stove with tools that seem less anthropomorphic after a few months of separation. 

But I am pretty sure that we are fermenting people. It's not just that fermenting is less work--you throw things in jars with water and maybe salt, check on them every evening or so, and let the microbes pull the weight. It's that fermenting seems looser and more forgiving to me, in my experience. Instead of trying to nuke all the microbes, good and bad, out of a jar and hope for a sterile environment, you nurture the right microbes so that they can demolish the bad ones. If mold grows on top, you skim it off. Not a big deal. And then you get to eat the good microbes, which do good upon good in your gut. 

I could wax scientific, thanks to the fantastic fermentation guide I copyedited this summer (Fermentation and Home Brewing: The Ultimate Resource), but no. I'm going to go put my feet up and eat some ice cream. It's recovery time. 

chicken

So far, we've tried whole chickens two ways: smeared with olive oil and herbs, stuffed with lemon, and roasted in a Dutch oven placed inside a 450 degree oven; and braised in a Dutch oven with soy sauce and lemon juice. Both delicious, juicy, and simple. 

Tonight, I stumbled on a gold-mine recipe for chicken breast. I'd been canning all day, so I needed something not just simple but fast, and while Tim was out of town and I almost felt like dipping into our emergency store of Annie's mac 'n cheese, I resisted. 

The New York Times Cooking app came to my rescue. I didn't follow the recipe I chose exactly, because when do I ever, and I even used the last dregs of a very bad bottle of white wine—and still, I give it a rave review. 

First, you brown a flour-dredged chicken breast in butter with chopped rosemary and garlic. After cooking it just 4 minutes on each side, you add lemon juice and white wine, cover, and cook 3 minutes more. 

When it was done, I set it aside on a plate tented with tinfoil, poured off most of the pan sauce into a little bowl, and tossed diced zucchini, beans, and leek into the hot pan. Turned up the heat. In another 4 minutes or so, the pan sauce had coated the vegetables and then evaporated, and the vegetables were still slightly crunchy and just starting to brown, my favorite way. 

I piled the veggies next to the chicken, drizzled the sauce on top of the chicken, and headed out to the back patio to commune with the view and consume the feast. 

Chicken Breasts With Rosemary and Lemon

Adapted from this recipe by Pierre Franey, published here: http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/4689-chicken-breasts-with-rosemary-and-lemon

Serves 1

1 whole skinless, boneless chicken breast

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

2 tablespoons butter

1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary 

1 garlic clove, minced 

1/4 cup white wine

2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

1 small leek, washed thoroughly and sliced thinly 

1 small zucchini, halved and then sliced thinly 

8 or so green beans 

Melt the butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. Meanwhile, pound the chicken breast to an even thickness. I think mine was about 1/2-inch thick in the end. Dredge it in the flour and season with salt and pepper on both sides. 

When the butter is just sort of browning a little, add the chicken. Scatter the rosemary and garlic on top and around the pan. Cook 3-4 minutes until the chicken is golden brown but not dark or crispy. Flip and do the same on the other side. 

Add the wine and lemon juice, cover, and cook for 3 or so more minutes until the chicken juices are no longer pink when you cut into it, but the chicken is still very moist and tender. 

Set the chicken aside on a plate, cover with foil, and set a kitchen towel on top to keep it hot. Pour off most of the pan sauce into a small bowl, reserving erough to just barely cover the bottom of the pan. 

Add the leek, zucchini, and beans and turn the heat up just slightly. Sauté, stirring often, until the pan sauce has evaporated and the vegetables are just barely browning, but definitely not limp yet (or, okay, if you're my husband, sauté until they're not crunchy anymore and very brown!). Four minutes max, I say!

Serve the vegetables next to the chicken. Drizzle the rest of the pan sauce on top of the chicken. 

snapshots

We're at the far left of the pasture above, just in the trees (photo by my grandpa, Lauren Rice).

Today's our five-month anniversary here. Although I meant to blog more this spring, I'm settling for snapshots instead, as I look back on where we started on April 1 and where we are now.

Moving here was a huge adjustment. First, the creatures called sheep that are now in our care! The lambs are not so cute as this one pictured above anymore; they're almost as big as their 200-pound mamas. But when we moved here, they were barely a few weeks old and jumpy and basically stuffed-animal adorable. I've been jumpy around them myself, especially lately; the pasture is so dry that we're feeding them hay and grain like it's winter, so when I feed them in the evenings, well, it's a stampede. With not-200-pound-me in the middle. However, tonight I wrangled one of them--pretty sure it was the lamb above, one of two all-white ones--when it escaped out the gate. Hauled it bodily back into the pasture, and felt like I'd graduated to the next level of shepherding.

The other huge adjustment was, well, that Seattle is far away. For a city girl at heart, it is still the weirdest thing to live so removed from normal noises like cars driving by, sirens wailing, neighbors talking, airplanes roaring overhead. Here, the soundtrack is sheep baaing. Wind sighing, sometimes. And okay, the volunteer fire department siren a-wailin' whenever there's an accident on the highway.

But the view is ever stunning. Mornings, mist waves across the golden pasture. Afternoons, the grass and the foothills and mountains in the distance shimmer in the heat, or appear and disappear through dramatic clouds. Evenings, Sauk Mountain flares pink--we watch the reflections of the sunset through our east-facing windows. Often, we count elk grazing at dusk. On nights with full moons, we go to bed with the light silvering the metal roof of the sheep shelter out in the pasture and the shivery sound of coyotes yelping.

Has country living already gotten under my skin? Maybe.

To top off all the change, we got a kitten--a little black thing named Ginger. From her two-pound beginnings here, she's been a wild one, playful and curious and actually sort of insane sometimes, like Jekyl and Hyde. She can be tearing laps around the house one hour and purring on the couch the next.  We built her two cat towers early on, one with a cozy box on top and the other with three different perches. Tim's dream come true would be to turn our whole house into a cat kingdom for her; he's that obsessed with this crazy cat.

Okay, I am somewhat obsessed, too. Even though she types things like this on my computer keyboard when I'm not looking:

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mid-May

My very favorite thing about this new place is our garden, nestled between the empty house next door (gets more sunlight over there) and a big shed.

early June

Now it's a veritable jungle of winter and summer squash, green and soup beans, potatoes, onions, leeks, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces and greens, cabbages, beets, and baby brussels sprouts and baby winter kale and cabbage.

The garden bookends my days. I water and harvest in the mornings, then water what needs it at midday. Our nightly ritual (and sometimes morning too) is to wander out and peer at things and exclaim over new growth. 

Weekends and some evenings this spring, through June, we were pretty much addicted to working here: turning new soil, planting new seeds, weeding, and chipping away at the garden fence we still need to finish, which will be our attempt to keep out the bunnies that nibble at our onion tops. 

Even as we're harvesting cucumbers by the basketful, and crossing our fingers for the tomatoes to overcome an all-around awful blossom end rot plague, and drowning in zucchini, and pulsing basil into pesto for the freezer, we're looking ahead to winter already. Above, the curlies of a winter squash plant. 

We have a regular fermentation factory in the coolest kitchen cupboard: turnips, radishes, beet kvass, sauerkraut, and pickles bubbling away at all hours of the day and night. I made the beet kvass with some trepidation, as the tang of fermented foods is not honestly my favorite and my obsession with fermentation up until now has been merely with the process, half romantic and half scientific--it's both magical and creepily fascinating to watch substrates transform by the actions of microbes I cannot see. But at the first sip of kvass the other week, I was hooked. Sweet, a little salty, and tongue-twistingly sour, it's now my summer drink of choice, cold and slightly carbonated. 

When we're not gardening, we hike the trail around the property here, a three or four mile loop through the forest along the river. Or explore our bigger backyard...the North Cascades. 

The swimmin' hole (I have yet to go swimming--glacier water!) on the property

Baker River

View from Sauk Mountain at sunset 

Phinney Creek forest road adventures (photo by my dad, Andrew Rice)

Cascade Pass

Lest this all sound and look too perfect, let me say that these five months have been a roller coaster, lurching through the lows of not knowing too many people around here as well as soaring through the highs snapshotted above. It's been lonely and hard, yet full and sweet all at the same time. But even in the midst of the lows, I would not change a thing about our decision to come here.