Hot summer nights

Zucchini is the pride and joy of summer. I love it, and torture my man by slipping it into everything from rice pilaf to curries, I've even dehydrated it for our backpack trips. Now the last time I tried growing zucchini all I grew was this vine that attracted moths. I spent quite a bit of time digging the zucchini worm out of the vine. Never got a zucchini. I've decided that buying them or having friends provide them is the best way of obtaining zucchini.

We went to the library last weekend and got this great Turkish cookbook in which I found a zucchini cake recipe. This is not your sweet cake type these are like potato latkes made with zucchini. As it was 92 degrees out, we decided to fry them outside on the grill.

You peel and grate 1.5 lbs of zucchini (love the cuisinart) then salt it for 15 minutes and squeeze to drain some of the water, then combine with fresh parsley and fennel (called for dill, next year I'm growing dill), some egg, feta and flour. Mix it up and fry it in small cakes.

We served it with some yogurt and asian spiced chicken and a yogurt-garlic-cucumber-chocolate mint sauce. We also made raspberry gin and tonics, squeezing the raspberries into the glass and filling it with tonic, a touch of lime and a bit of gin. Very pretty drinks.

For dessert we decided to walk to the Giant. One of the reasons we live where we do is we are able to walk 1 mile to the left and get to the Giant and one mile to the right and get to the Eddies. Very practical. It was a tough decision but we chose ice cream on a stick for the practicality of walking home. Now understand that this is no ordinary ice cream on a stick. The Dove triple chocolate ice cream bar has a 1mm thick (this is thick) coating of chocolate surrounding chocolate ice cream with a fudge swirl. The chocolate pieces break off in your hands and you eat them seperately. Ok so maybe we should have gone to the gym instead ;-)

By the way, the tomatoes have started.