Zucchini

I got the idea for this recipe from a Greek restaurant I worked at. The horseradish sauce is my favorite thing about them because I love that rush of spiciness that clears the sinuses.

These are light and healthy, and so packed with flavor that everyone will love them. The sauce has a classic combo of Southeast Asian flavors that go so well together—salty, sweet, sour, and spicy. Just be careful with the chili paste. It’s hot . . . really hot.

This is called a casserole because when my grandmother makes it she sautés the vegetables, then puts them in a casserole dish and bakes them with the cheese on top. You can do that if you want, but I say why bother? It’s faster and easier to cook it all in one pan, and it tastes exactly the same. As for the breadcrumbs, any kind works, so we usually go with plain.

Stir-frying is one of the quickest, easiest, and healthiest ways to cook, and this recipe is a great introduction. You don’t need a wok or any other special equipment, just a regular old frying pan and a spatula or wooden spoon. Once you get this recipe down, you can add your own touches. More or less spice, different vegetables, more garlic or ginger, different sauces—the possibilities are endless! One word of caution with this and other stir-fries: if you add wet vegetables to hot oil, the oil will sputter and spit, so drain or pat excess water off your ingredients.

Here’s a great party dish that feeds a horde and can be made a day ahead and baked at the last minute. It can handle an endless amount of fiddling—from adding more vegetables (I’ve tucked in layers of sautéed sliced yellow and green zucchini, eggplant, red and green peppers, and mushrooms, to name a few) to tweaks like eliminating all cheese (including in the pesto) for a vegan version created for my lactose-intolerant daughter (see Variation). Buy prepared pesto if you want less prep work.

This hearty salad is packed with so many vegetables that I often serve it as a main course. It’s a real lifesaver when guests announce, “Oh, by the way, did I mention I’m a vegetarian?” It welcomes just about any edible treasure from the farmers’ market or my garden, from sliced sugar snap peas to colorful nasturtium flowers, slender French green beans to crunchy cucumbers, plus all kinds of peppers. Think seasonally: try fall veggies like roasted acorn squash, steamed broccoli florets, or fall lettuces, or bias-cut and steamed spring asparagus. Any good artisan bread will do, but I prefer a dense white or whole-wheat sourdough; try day-old loaves from your bakery.

These pancakes are delicious with a dollop of sour cream.

Another great make-ahead dish, this is an appealing way to serve zucchini at room temperature or chilled. Salting the zucchini and letting it sit for about 30 minutes gets rid of excess liquid and keeps this dish from becoming watery. If you make this ahead of time, remove it from the refrigerator about thirty minutes before serving and taste it. You may find that you need extra shakes of salt and pepper, and an extra squeeze or two of lemon juice.

A delicious and painless way to sneak more vegetables into the brunch, these crêpes are good for when brunch tilts more in the direction of breakfast. You can make the filling a day in advance and store it, tightly covered, in the refrigerator. Warm it over low heat before using it as a filling.

This late-summer indulgence showcases a harvest of vegetables abundant from August until the end of September. Although you can buy these ingredients year-round, this frittata is at its best when made with ripe in-season produce. This recipe can be doubled, but don’t try to make more than two frittatas at a time or you’ll end up with runny, undercooked eggs. This is delicious accompanied by garlic toast. Serve with Potato Pancakes (page 213).

This rich, dense bread is flecked with green from the zucchini and adorned with delicate zucchini blossoms on top. The flowers, which are available at gourmet specialty stores, are a beautiful addition, but the loaf is equally delicious with or without them. You can also use this batter for muffins, in which case you’ll have about twenty-four muffins and you’ll need to bake them for 20 to 25 minutes.

Packed with all kinds of good ingredients, these muffins make a densely flavorful treat that, if paired with yogurt, could almost be a light meal on its own. Buckwheat flour is made from the dry fruit seeds of the buckwheat plant, and is available at most health food stores.

A contemporary take on the ground meat–stuffed marrow. This economical supper stands or falls by the way the meat is cooked. The real flavor here comes from the caramelization of the sugars in the meat. To make the most of this, I have the oil at quite a high temperature as I add the meat, then resist the temptation to stir or turn the meat too soon. Continual movement will result in “wet” rather than crisp-edged, golden ground pork.

Green lentils and bacon has long been a salad worth making. I will occasionally fold in some shards of crisp, olive-oil-drenched toasted ciabatta or lots of whole parsley leaves. A couple of years ago I started moving the whole thing up a notch by putting the lentils against a few pieces of exquisite Spanish ham and adding a certain smokiness with wide slivers of zucchini, their edges blackened from the grill. This has become a late-summer lunch I can’t get enough of.

Middle Eastern cooking is flecked with the cool pepperiness of fresh mint. Italian, and especially Sicilian, cooks include mint with zucchini, often in tandem with garlic and lemon. I find mint invigorating with all summer squashes and often make a dish where they (pattypan is particularly suitable) are cooked in olive oil with mint and the merest hint of garlic. It is very good with grilled fish.

2008 saw not only my usual terra-cotta pots of Striato d’Italia on the back steps but also a trailing variety known as Caserta, a pale fruit the color of mint ice cream, with darker stripes. The light-skinned varieties such as Clarion, Di Faenza, and the almost ivory Lebanese White Bush look particularly delicate and summery when sautéed in butter and olive oil with a handful of herbs thrown in at the last moment, the scent of late summer hitting you as you spoon over the pan juices. Perhaps that should be swoon. Squashes of every variety love a tomato. Occasionally you could argue they need it too. Late last summer, just as the beans were forming on the poles in the vegetable beds, I made a last-minute, rough-edged supper with little more than a few zucchini and a couple of tomatoes. It was done in fifteen minutes flat. There are many who would insist on skinning and seeding the tomatoes for this, but not only do I think it unnecessary here, it also means missing out on all their rich juices and scrunchy seeds.