learning old recipes

I never thought Saturday would find me trying to find a good recipe for our 300th zucchini. The plants are growing in spades and unfortunately my husband really dislikes zucchini.  The irony of this situation isn't lost on me and the fact of the matter is...I can only eat so much squash without a recipe change!  So I decided something had to be done! I don't have a food dehydrator, so that was out of the question, and while I love the idea of pickling the one thing my DH hates more than zucchini is pickles that aren't from Claussen.  I was really at a loss since I didn't want to just freeze them as is.That's when I decided it was time to break out the vintage cook books.

I have been wanting to learn recipes from my old cookbooks for a really long time. It seems a shame that a lot of these recipes will disappear from our kitchen memories. So the idea of cooking something that my great grandmother may have eaten is a bit of a connection to the past. Okay, maybe not my great grandmother since she would have been eating traditional hispanic food and as far as I can tell no one in the 12th Street Presbyterian church that put together a cookbook in 1935 knew what hispanic food was. But someone's great grandmother must have made zucchini puffs and I am going to learn how!Along with the rest of the recipes from the Gourmet vintage cookbooks and all the other ones I have and share my triumphs and failures here. (And there will be failures. There's a recipe for salad suspended in gelatin...*shiver*) I think learning some of the older methods might just be really fun. Culinary school taught me a lot of new methods, but I think if I learn how things happen and why it'll be really interesting.

The garden is well on it's way too. With black krim tomatoes coming in droves, and the corn reaching 6 feet high now, we're well on our way to a really nice group of crops. We found out that the people we're watching the plot for won't be back for at least another month so we set out to grow a couple more carrots and some swiss chard as a thank you for letting us use their plot. By the time it's all grown in we'll be well on our way to more squash. Since it's almost the beginning of july we planted for our second harvest. More seed in the ground means more food. It's the one thing I love about California. We get such great growing weather.

Next month we'll be buying soil and really starting in on the patio garden. I still need to order seeds but once things get really started I'll be able to save them from the patio. We plan on growing strawberries in hanging baskets, herbs and some sort of vining plant is we can help it. Here's to planting!