zucchini larceny 187tas are still delicious at this size, though daunting. We split and stuffed
them with sautéed onions, bread crumbs, and cheese, and baked them in
our outdoor bread oven. All dinner guests were required to eat squash,
and then take some home in plastic sacks. We started considering dinner-
guest lists, in fact, with an eye toward those who did not have gardens.
Our gardening friends knew enough to slam the door if they saw a heavy
sack approaching.
Camille gamely did her part. Before her sister’s birthday she adapted
several different recipes into a genius invention: chocolate chip zucchini
cookies. She made a batch of about a hundred, obliterating in the process
several green hulks that had been looming in the kitchen. She passed the
tray around to Lily’s friends at the birthday party, with a sly grin, as they
crowded around the kitchen table to watch Lily open her presents.
Fourth- graders hate squash. We watched them chew. They asked for sec-
onds. Ha!
Camille dared them to guess the secret ingredient, slanting her eyes
suggestively at the dark green blimps that remained (one of them cut in
half) on the kitchen counter.
“Cinnamon? Oatmeal! Candy canes??”
We’ll never tell. But after the wrapping paper had flown, with all dust
settled and the hundred cookies eaten, we still had more of those dirigi-
bles on the counter.
Had we planted too many vines? Should we let the weeds take them
early? Oh, constant squash, they never let you down. Early one Saturday
morning as I lay sleepless, I whispered to Steven, “We need to get a hog.”
“A hog?”
“For the squash.”
He knew I couldn’t be serious. For one thing, hogs are intelligent
enough to become unharvestable. Their eyes communicate an endearing
sensibility that poultry eyes don’t, even when you’ve raised them from the
darling stage. We didn’t need a pet pig.
But we did need something to dispatch all this zucchini—some useful
purpose for the pyramid of excess vegetable biomass that was taking over
our lives. My family knows I’m congenitally incapable of wasting food. I