Today, we bought way too much zucchini. It was at a community produce “thing” — not really a farmer’s market, not actually a CSA endeavor, but it got us lots of produce for cheap and helped out a local school club. In terms of price, it was worth it for the bell peppers alone.
But it did leave me with a plethora of zucchini. The students manning that station had enthusiastically heaped them into our box before we could quite say no. I understand this about zucchini.
So I spent a little while looking up and soliciting zucchini recipes. I’m fond of cooked zucchini as a steamed vegetable side, but we have too much for that use to be sufficient. I’m fond of a good zucchini bread, but I am not fond of baking the good zucchini bread myself. This holds largely true for other baked goods as well. (I can put time and effort into a savory dish and at the end of it, still want to eat said savory dish. If I put time and effort into making a sweet baked good — for this purpose, zucchini bread counts — some visceral reaction kicks in partway through, and my body and brain decide, “ZOMG! Anything sweeter than horseradish is now officially disgusting!” So, yeah, I’m not a regular baker for a reason.)
After a bit, I stumbled upon a recipe for zucchini salsa. I though, “Huh. I like salsa. Husband likes salsa. Could we like zucchini salsa?” My dad had tried zucchini salsa when I was a kid, so I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with it. However, he made it in such a way that zucchini was a minor ingredient in an otherwise traditional salsa. Which is fine in its own right but felt a little like trying to “hide” the zucchini amid other ingredients. But I recently read this post at The Fat Nutritionist. Several comments discussed the idea of either disguising foods (usually vegetables) in other foods or some foods acting as “healthy stand-ins” for other foods — instead of appreciating (or not) all of those foods for exactly what they are. So I was interested in a zucchini salsa recipe that featured zucchini as a main ingredient.
I found several, including a few that were tailored to small (experimental!) quantities. However, none of the ingredient lists looked quite right, so I compiled and tried one of my own:
Zucchini Salsa:
2 cups diced zucchini
1 cup diced onion
1 cup diced tomatoes
1 cup chopped cilantro*
2 jalapenos, more or less to taste, diced fine
6 tbsp lime juice
some garlic
some dried red chile, if it turns out you really wanted more jalapeno, like I did
- Heat it all up in a saucepan or whatever until the onion and zucchini are soft.
- At the beginning, some stirring may be required to make sure everything gets mixed evenly.
- I always recommend adding hot pepper gradually and tasting at various points. Being surprised by too-bland salsa is not exactly the highlight of my day, but it is a damn sight easier to deal with than suddenly finding my mouth on fire.
- Let cool enough to mix everything up in a blender.
When I taste this, the flavor is fairly similar to that of a tomato- or tomatillo-based salsa though there’s a hint of bitterness from the zucchini peel. As you might be able to guess by my descriptions of sweet, this doesn’t bother me in the slightest; however, other people might want to either add more lime or to peel the zucchini before starting.
The texture, though, interests me. Due to the composition of the zucchini, I’m sure, it’s thicker than the average salsa. I am hoping this means it will stay better on a corn chip — but alas! — I have not yet bought corn chips.
[Not a picture of my actual food. But it looks more or less like this.]
* If you’re one of the people who likes cilantro. I am. Also, 1 cup of it just sitting, fluffy-like, in the measuring container — not packed down. Unless you really like cilantro.
