It’s all in the wrist (not really!)

So tonight, I decided to really buckle down and cook with some of this week’s CSA ingredients.

A friend sent me a recipe for zucchini fritters. The recipe she sent was more like an appetizer-style thing, which was fine, but I wanted to find something more like the shredded zucchini cakes I remember my mom making. So I looked and sure enough, found a simple (it has to be simple, I’m just not a 15-step cookery kind of a person) recipe. I only needed a few other ingredients so I picked those up after work. Lo and behold – and I know I’ll regret saying this later – I only had one zucchini left!! But it was big enough so I grated that up in a colander in the sink. Added some salt and then squeezed the living daylights out of it to get the water out. Grated some Parm and added some chopped onion, a farm-fresh egg and some flour and also some chopped dill from my own container garden. Heated up some oil and I had some pretty tasty little morsels.

Cooking with these CSA ingredients and with fresh food, especially if you’ve never done it before, is totally learn-as-you-go. I think people can feel intimidated by those cooking shows, where there are tons of behind-the-scenes people prepping ingredients and food stylists to make sure the dishes don’t look like like, well, something you and I would cook!

But I think we shouldn’t let that scare us away or let the fact that others we know may brag about their outstanding cooking abilities. Each of us is an individual and we all have different skills and gifts – and we have different abilities. My little zucchini fritters probably weren’t the most photogenic but they were tasty and I made them myself so that makes today’s CSA food experiment a success in my book!