Squash Blossoms

Cooking with squash blossoms seems very fussy and restaurant-y, but we have oodles of squash blossoms in the garden this year. A lot of them, I've noticed, don't go on to become squashes, but just wither and fall off. I learned from Alice Walker's Chez Panisse Vegetables that "The male flowers, those without tiny squashes attached, are generally preferred for stuffing." Aha, only female squash blossoms turn into squashes. It's probably ignorant that I didn't know this already. I learned a bit more about squash pollination from wikipedia. We are growing four kinds of squash this year, yellow crookneck, butterstick (yellow zucchini), so-called Sweet Gourmet Hybrid (to me, they look just like the calabacita squashes that are common in Mexican grocery stores), and zucchini. We got our seeds from Burpee. The zucchini are crammed against the fence and rather crowded; maybe the bees can't get to them as well and they aren't getting effectively pollinated? We aren't getting nearly as many zucchini as the other sorts of squash.

So, I gathered my squash blossoms and made Summer Squash Blossoms Stuffed with Ricotta from the aforementioned Chez Panisse Vegetables, p. 311. Basically, you stuff the blossoms with a mixture of ricotta, egg, parmesan, butter, flour, and salt, and then poach them for 6 minutes. Drain, then serve with sage butter. The recipe urges you to use blossoms with tiny squashes attached as well as the male blossoms.



So here they are. It was a lot of work, and they were good, but a bit watery. There's another recipe where the squash blossoms are stuffed with mozzarella, dredged in corn flour and fried. Maybe I'll try that some time, but it sounds heavy, like squash blossom poppers.

I had a lot of filling left after stuffing my 8 blossoms. Maybe Alice Walker has bigger blossoms than I do. So, I stuffed some "sweet gourmet" squash halves with the filling, then baked them @ 425 for about 45 minutes, until cook through and nicely browned. That was pretty good also.

The best Alice Walker recipe I tried, and the one that I will surely make again, is a simple squash saute. You saute sliced squash in olive oil until tender and just starting to brown, then add garlic, fresh basil or marjoram, salt, and pepper. After a minute, turn off the heat, add a squeeze of lemon juice, and serve. (Actually, I would add the basil along with the lemon juice, because basil gets drab and flavorless if it cooks very much.)