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My friend Linda made some Zucchini Bisque the other day. I've never been a big fan of zucchini, (too many bad zucchini memories from my childhood) but now I've changed my mind, because Linda's Zucchini Bisque was the best soup I'd ever eaten.
I have a lot of great memories about growing up in a small town, but zucchini season is not one of them. Every year when the first home grown zucchini was spotted, word spread quickly and the friendly community where I lived suddenly became a ghost town. The small town dwellers locked their doors, pulled the drapes and hid in fear until the zucchini plague had passed over.
Gardens are plentiful in a small town and so is their bounty--especially zucchini. Each zucchini seed packet contains about 40 seeds and no respectable gardener can seem to resist planting each and every one of them. With almost any other vegetable you could count on casualties, so things would even themselves out, but not with zucchini.
Zucchinis have got the vegetable procreation thing down pat. Plant those 40 seeds in lousy soil, ignore them, deprive them of fertilizer, but as long as the sun shines and it rains, they'll grow...and grow...and grow. And that's the problem.
Zucchini bread and cake, stuffed zucchini, grilled zucchini pizza, chocolate zucchini slices, zucchini and cream cheese sandwiches, enough already. So what's a small town gardener do with their never-ending crop? Why, share them with the neighbors, of course.
But if your neighbors seem to duck out of sight whenever you stop by with a bundle of zucchini joy, take a hint from this small town girl--make a midnight run. Drop the zucchini off on your neighbor's doorstep--and run. --Suzanne Beecher
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