Give a man a zucchini and he will eat for a day. Give a man a zucchini plant, and he will wind up with so much zucchini he won’t know what to do with it, and he’ll probably end up resenting you.
Fortunately, zucchini is so versatile it can be used in a seemingly endless variety of dishes. Nevertheless, everyone with too much zucchini usually just ends up making zucchini bread. We try to convince ourselves that it is healthful because it has zucchini in it and it is bread, but deep down we all know that it is really just zucchini cake.
So I made four dishes, none of them involving cake, that managed to make a pretty good dent in anybody’s zucchini harvest.
Each, in its own way, was richly satisfying. Zucchini is often used as an afterthought, a vegetable that you may grab at the store because it is inexpensive and you haven’t had it for a while. But in each of these dishes, the zucchini becomes a star.