The Humble Zucchini
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PHOTO: @achera UnSplash
by Hannah Rosenberg
A particular dish, perhaps a pumpkin pie recipe or a creamy green bean casserole, often harbors decades of memories, familiar flavors, and the nostalgic connection to friends and family. While I share the love of eating foods that evoke time around the Thanksgiving table or jokes with friends, a single ingredient--the sweet pop of a spice, the crunch of a vegetable--can provide the same comforts and sentiment. For me, that ingredient is the humble zucchini: the green summer squash that accumulates in farmers markets and supermarkets across the Northeast. When I was in elementary school, my dad would receive a seed catalog with hundreds of pictures of crops, including Zinnia flowers, variations of sugar snap peas, and pumpkins that had no chance of growing in our New York climate—a gardener’s delight. My dad poured over the garden possibilities and revelled in the idea that through his labor and nature’s handiwork, these miniscule seeds would blossom into vegetables for summer meals. As I try to trace the roots of my summer vegetable obsession, I land in recurring moments in my dad’s garden. I loved the process of producing food from seeds, connecting to the earth, and searching for the perfect not-quite-ripe vegetable to pull from a plant when my dad was not looking. Throughout the spring, I would shove on my blue camouflage rain boots, stomping around the grass of our backyard, as he unclipped the steel keychain that connected the collapsing black-wired fence that hung around the perimeter of the garden to a stick of wood: the door to the vegetable enchantment. Stepping in the overgrown patch, my dad would place a handful of zucchini seeds in my hand. I mirrored what he did, drawing a line in the mulch with a stick, plunging my finger into the plush ground to make a hole, and burying a seed into the earth, gently covering it with a pile of dirt. Once those tiny flecks grew to greet the mild spring air with rows of green stems and yellowing flowers, my dad and I would spend early mornings in the dewy spring air plucking our crops from the patch of abundance. Exchanging smiles as we muddied our fingers, my dad and I kneeled in the plot of dirt and greenery before our neighbors’ alarms howled.
