herbs | "blackberry-eating in late September"

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.

What does one make with half a package of wonton wrappers slowly succumbing to freezer-burn, a yard full of fragrant spearmint, and a package of cherry tomatoes?

Homemade ravioli.

A few months ago, during that first spell of beautiful heat, N. and our friend S. and I went to the annual Friends of the Eugene Library booksale. Amidst nerdy volumes, I found two glorious, inexpensive cookbooks, and it was from a volume called “Everyday Epicurean” that I found the recipe for this simple and really quite delish ravioli concoction.

The filling combines crumbled feta cheese, cream cheese, herbs, and the magic ingredient: a small pickled jalapeño pepper. After a whirl in the food processor, half a tablespoon of filling gets mounded in the center of a square wonton wrapper, which you fold into a triangle after moistening the edges with water. Stow your raviolis safely on a WELL-FLOURED cookie sheet while you finish producing the batch.

I stuck mine in the refrigerator for a few hours before dropping the delicate little stuffed triangles into a boiling pot, though the recipe didn’t call for this. While the little darlings boiled, I mixed up the sauce, which consisted mainly of cherry tomatoes and mint, just barely heated up in a sauté pan with some hot olive oil. Since my tummy doesn’t do well with heavy processed tomato sauces, this was near perfect for me.

The result was heavenly. The raviolis stuck together a little bit while I was pulling them out of the pot, and one or two of them may have leaked a little bit (the water was pretty cloudy by the time they were done), but it didn’t seem to matter. Unlike the usual frozen variety we depend on in a pinch, the wonton skins were ultra-thin and delicate, and tasted more like restaurant fare than the quick fix from the freezer section. The filling was creamy and rich, but not overpoweringly so, as the sharp bite from the pickled jalapeño inside and the sweet acidic tang from the tomatoes outside cut through the potentially cloying velvet of the cheese. Served up with a toaster-oven broiled slice of romano-garlic toast, this was completely worth the effort of creating all those little packages. Maybe the cliché about good things is true after all.