Squash your plans to eat any other vegetables today: unless they’re long and green, they just don’t measure up. August 8 is National Zucchini Day!
It’s also National Frozen Custard Day, and that presented us with an interesting dilemma: there’s a frozen custard joint in town that churns out delicious, creamy frozen custard. But, with so many desserts on the calendar, whenever the opportunity arises to have something that isn’t sweet, we jump on it. Sure enough, the healthy choice beat out the far more decadent choice, and we decided to honor zucchini (which tend to get far too little respect this time of year anyway, growing to inordinately large sizes and ending up dumped on unsuspecting neighbors’ doorsteps in alarming numbers).
The truth is, like tomatoes and Carmen Miranda’s hat, zucchini are technically a fruit, not a vegetable. I actually failed to mention this fact on National Zucchini Bread Day, but did cover the history of the squash itself, so click on the link if you want to know how/where it originated.
We didn’t want to repeat ourselves and bake zucchini bread again, so we got more creative this time. I like the challenges where we repurpose the main ingredient in unexpected ways, straying from the obvious. We made pork and chicken fajitas for dinner, and added sliced zucchini to our vegetable mix (peppers, onions, and mushrooms). Traditional Mexican? Not at all, but that didn’t matter a bit. It was delicious!
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Eat My Words 
Zucchini sautéd in butter with scrambled eggs is divine. I will sometimes add yellow crookneck squash as well.
Growing up, my dad would grow the zucchini rather large and my step-mom would dip them in egg, then flour and fry them up. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and holy cow!! Talk about being transported back 35+ years. I just wish stores would sell them big instead of the small ones.
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Tara has made that for me before, and I agree – delicious! Especially with some hot sauce. I actually wanted her to make it to celebrate the holiday, but alas, she had to go in to work early. Luckily, we still have more zucchini in the fridge! Small ones, though.
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Thank you for linking to my site! We, too, have been looking for all kinds of creative zucchini ideas! I love the Mexican fajita twist idea! Warmest wishes to you!
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My pleasure! The zucchini worked surprisingly well in this dish. They’d go well in a stir-fry, too.
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