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By Root 920 0

restaurant fare when we sautéed them with the blossoms still attached. On July 6 I picked two little pattypans (the white squash that look like flying saucers), four yellow crooknecks, six golden zucchini, and five large Costata Romanescas—a zucchini relative with a beautifully firm texture and a penchant for attaining the size of a baseball bat overnight. I am my father’s daughter, always game for the new seed-catalog adventure, and I am still in charge of the squash region of the garden. I can overdo things, but wasn’t ready to admit that yet. “I love all this squash,” I declared, bringing the rainbow of their shapes and colors into the kitchen along with the season’s first beans (Purple Romano and Gold of Bacau), Mini White cucumbers, five-color chard, and some Chioggia beets, an Italian heirloom that displays red and white rings like a target when sliced in cross-section. I was still cheerful two days later when I brought in the day’s nineteen squash. And then thirty-three more over the next week, including a hefty haul of cubit-long Costatas. Unlike other squash, Costatas are still delicious at this size, though daunting. We split and stuffed them with sautéed onions, bread crumbs, and cheese, and baked them in our outdoor bread oven. All dinner guests were required to eat squash, and then take some home in plastic sacks. We started considering dinner-guest lists, in fact, with an eye toward those who did not have gardens. Our gardening friends knew enough to slam the door if they saw a heavy sack approaching.

Camille gamely did her part. Before her sister’s birthday she adapted several different recipes into a genius invention: chocolate chip zucchini cookies. She made a batch of about a hundred, obliterating in the process several green hulks that had been looming in the kitchen. She passed the tray around to Lily’s friends at the birthday party, with a sly grin, as they crowded around the kitchen table to watch Lily open her presents. Fourth-graders hate squash. We watched them chew. They asked for seconds. Ha!

Camille dared them to guess the secret ingredient, slanting her eyes suggestively at the dark green blimps that remained (one of them cut in half) on the kitchen counter.

“Cinnamon? Oatmeal! Candy canes??”

We’ll never tell. But after the wrapping paper had flown, with all dust settled and the hundred cookies eaten, we still had more of those dirigibles on the counter.

Had we planted too many vines? Should we let the weeds take them early? Oh, constant squash, they never let you down. Early one Saturday morning as I lay sleepless, I whispered to Steven, “We need to get a hog.”

“A hog?”

“For the squash.”

He knew I couldn’t be serious. For one thing, hogs are intelligent enough to become unharvestable. Their eyes communicate an endearing sensibility that poultry eyes don’t, even when you’ve raised them from the darling stage. We didn’t need a pet pig.

But we did need something to dispatch all this zucchini—some useful purpose for the pyramid of excess vegetable biomass that was taking over our lives. My family knows I’m congenitally incapable of wasting food. I was raised by frugal parents who themselves grew up in the Depression, when starvation seemed a genuine possibility. I have now, as a grown-up, learned to buy new jeans when mine have patches on the patches, but I have not learned to throw perfectly good food in the garbage. Not even into the compost, unless it has truly gone bad. To me it feels like throwing away a Rolex watch or something. (I’m just guessing on that.) Food was grown by the sweat of someone’s brow. It started life as a seed or newborn and beat all the odds. It’s intrinsically the most precious product in our lives, from an animal point of view.

But there sat this pile on the kitchen counter, with its relatives jammed into a basket in the mudroom—afloat between garden and kitchen—just waiting for word so they could come in here too: the Boat Zucchinis.

Sometimes I just had to put down my knives and admire their extravagant success. Their hulking, elongated cleverness. Their