One of the side benefits of being married to a medical dude is that I very occasionally get taken to a nice dinner that is paid for by Big Pharma. Not often, due to industry restrictions, but sometimes. It’s fantastic, because they always pick the best restaurants in town, and I’m usually allowed to get kind of tipsy and tell them how many robots* Chris has in his home office.
*Hint: MANY
This last dinner was held at Mizuna in Denver, which is one of my all-time favorite Colorado restaurants. The Colorado restaurant scene is surprisingly underwhelming overall, but there are a few gems in the Denver Metro area, and Mizuna is one of them. It’s a Frank Bonanno restaurant. He won the Food Network Mac and Chee challenge a few years back, and his lobster mac and chee is still on the menu (and still fantastic and rich and decadent, even if I do take against lobster). The last time we went, I had the vegetarian option, which was this absolutely dreamy stuffed, handmade gnocchi with porcinis or morels…I can’t remember. I would eat it again. Without question.
But when we arrived for the drug rep dinner, the vegetarian option (which I had hoped to eat again) was actually something to do with courgettes and frisee. It had a large number of words, which usually means it’s trying to be something it’s not.
Do you know what a courgette is? It’s a ZUCCHINI. Needless to say, I did not order this entree.
At my house, currently, we are drowning in zucchini and yellow squash. I originally planted one zucchini and one yellow squash seed as self-esteem crops. Basically, I knew they’d grow even if nothing else did, and since it was my first year gardening, I wanted to feel successful at something, even if it was a gourd of which I am not particularly fond. Those two seeds have turned into one 4×4 foot zucchini and two small yellow crookneck plants, placed about 6 feet away from one another.
Yeah. They cloned and migrated. Of their own volition. And you’re still worried about a robot apocalypse?
The zucchini plant turns out a steady number of large, green Louisville sluggers. I try to catch them as babies, both because they are more tender, and because it means disposing of less zucchini, but this seems to only encourage them to produce more zucchinis, larger, and faster than before. I’ve gotten a couple that are literally as big as my femur, and I am not a short girl.
The yellow crookneck squash plants are filthy whores. Even picking them as fast as nature allows, I currently have about 16 actual squashes on two small plants. They’re coming hot and heavy and are now getting sort of deformed, like they’ve given up completely on quality, and are now just breeding for quantity. STOP BREEDING, SQUASH! YOU CAN’T EVEN AFFORD THE KIDS YOU’VE GOT!
So I’m doing everything but running out there with a spray bottle of liquid prenatals and hosing them down, hoping that the extra folic acid will help them develop into normal, healthy-looking squash. You think I’m employing literary exaggeration?
Eat the flowers! pick them, rip them into bits, dip them in batter and fry them. tasty and light, and it means fewer fruit!
Oh and seriously – be grateful you didn't go away. I left them alone for two weeks and came back to giant marrows. and after that the damm plant upped and stopped producing much of anything (no wonder, it was exhausted after gestating those marrows!)
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You can pull off the baby squash before they get fertilized…or you could pull off all the male flowers so they don't do the fertilizing. You can eat them, like Maria says. and as I'm sure you already knew.
How to tell when Butternuts are ready to pick: When you can't dent the rind with a fingernail. Be sure to pick them, no matter what, before your first frost. They're like tomatoes – they don't like the cold; but even more so.