Anticipating a bumper crop of zucchini from the moment we planted our starts, I spent the late spring / early summer evenings scouring cookbooks for likely recipes.  I marked so many that now it’s just a project of choosing between them.  For Part 2 of this continuing series, I chose zucchini fritters.

These were sticky, but pretty easy to assemble, being simply a mix of shredded zucchini, onion, some herbs, and flour.  The fritters in this photo look remarkably like cheddar cheese, but that is actually yellow zucchini, which is part of the reason for this sequence of posts.  We thought we were purchasing one zucchini plant (green) and one crookneck summer squash plant.  However, the yellow squashes ended up looking suspiciously like… guess what… zucchini!  And indeed, that is what they are.  Two zucchini plants = more creative zucchini recipes for me.

With the fritters delicately molded, I scooped them gently into a big pan of shimmering olive oil to fry (not to toot my own photography-skills horn, but I love how you can see the texture of the olive oil in the pan in this photograph.  When recipes elusively call for adding the food when the oil is “shimmering,” I’m pretty sure this is a textbook example of what they mean).  With the oil only about ¼ inch deep and nice and hot before adding the victims, they didn’t absorb too much.

After a brief drain on paper towels, I stacked them all up on a plate, added crumbled feta cheese and finely grated parmesan cheese to the top, and served hot.  The hotter the better, I think.

You can see the texture here: the onion and flour made these fritters reminiscent of latkes, although the flavor was definitely zucchini, with the sharp greenness of the chopped herbs and the salty tang of the feta and parmesan.  They were crispy but still moist, and despite it being our third zucchini dish in two weeks, there were no leftovers.