The garden has been growing steadily and there have been a few successes and a few things that didn’t take.
The lettuce and spinach didn’t really seem to flourish and the seeds I planted didn’t really take root and grow. Instead, what I have is this……
A mixture of lettuce and weeds. Okay. Mainly weeds. I’m finding that if I’m not in the garden everyday taking out those nasty weeds that are overrunning my lettuce,
But aside from the lettuce, everything else seems to be flourishing. Especially the zucchini. This has me more excited than most of the other vegetables in the garden. Mainly because with the zucchini plant comes zucchini flowers.
Growing up, my nonna used to pull the zucchini flowers from the plant, dip them in a light batter and then quickly fry them up for us to eat. In Italy, the early spring and summer brings zucchini flowers to the market stalls and people rush to buy them. They are a delicacy.
When the first buds sprouted, I was more excited to see them than I was to see the beginnings of a vegetable at the end of the flower. So excited, that I nearly picked every flower in the patch. According to the organic gardening book that Rose purchased for me…this is a no-no. A few females need to be left in the garden in order to produce the zucchini.
Thankfully, I discovered this before picking the garden patch clean of them.
Once you’ve picked the flower from the plant you should plan on using them quickly as discolour quickly. You could put them in the fridge for about a day but that’s probably the extent of their shelf life. Give them a rinse, gently open the flower, remove the stamen and set it aside to dry.
The batter is an easy one. Mix together flour, water, salt and pepper. No real measurements here. You don’t want it to be too watery, but it shouldn’t be thick either. The consistency should be enough to coat the flower without weighing it down. Fill a pan with olive oil and quickly fry each side of the flower until you have a beautiful golden colour.
In the end, you get a light, crispy, delicate tasting treat that can only be enjoyed in the moment of the season.
