Zucchini: Fritters <—> Cake

Zucchini fritters — beignets de courgettes — are a late-summer classic wherever people plant summer squash in their vegetable gardens. I made some the other day, and they were delicious.

The recipe is very simple. Just mix together:

1 large zucchini, grated
1 small onion, diced
3 eggs, beaten
½ cup grated cheese
1 cup milk
2 cups flour
salt, pepper, spices, and herbs

Remember, a U.S. cup is 8 fluid ounces — dry ingredients are measured out by volume, not weight, in the U.S.

Let the batter rest for 20 to 30 minutes. Then use a ladle or big spoon to drop batter into a pan with a little bit of vegetable oil or butter. When the fritters start to brown around the edges, turn them over and finish cooking them on the other side. Drain the fritters on paper towels and keep them warm in the oven while you cook some more.

Serve the fritters as a main course or as a side dish. They would be good with a yogurt sauce like Greek tzatziki. We had ours with a chorizette sausage (mostly beef with some pork and lamb, and spicy).

I had made a lot of fritter batter and I used only half of it to make about a dozen good-size fritters. I put the rest in the refrigerator, wondering if it would freeze well. Then I thought: it's just a cake batter. So I added some more flour and another egg to the remaining batter and baked it in a loaf pan in the oven.

What I wanted was a savory zucchini bread, so I added some spices (turmeric for color, black pepper, cayenne pepper, fennel powder, cumin) and I sauteed a package of smoked pork lardons to mix into the batter. And it worked. It made a moist cake that's good served cold with a glass of wine at apéro time.

The next time I want to make a savory cake, I think I'll make the fritter batter and just bake it as a cake rather than cook it in a frying pan. I'll let you know how it works out.

Something to look forward to

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. If the predicted rain doesn't damage them... Walt has the plants tied to stakes, so few of the tomatoes themselves are touching the ground. They should be fine.

These photos I took yesterday morning are just a sample. There are 30 plants in the garden, and each plant seems to have produced a lot of fruit.

We'll make liters and liters of tomato sauce. We'll dry as many tomatoes as we can in the dehydrator.

We'll make tomato paste too. You just take some sauce you've made, put in a thin layer in a big lasagna pan, and put it in the oven at about 200ºF (90ºC) for a few hours until it concentrates and thickens. It's easier to store for the winter than sauce is.

And we'll of course be eating a lot of these tomatoes in salads and pasta dishes, and on pizzas, when they've had time to ripen. And we'll share them with our neighbors too. Here's hoping for a sunny, fairly dry rest-of-summer, into October.

A plethora of plums

Une pléthore de prunes, in other words. The dictionary says that's "literary" in French. Des prunes en surabondance. And they have been coming from our neighbors. Our two plum trees blew down in a big windstorm in 2010. This year, one neighbor had a bumper crop of little red plums. Now another has an even bigger crop of little yellow plums, some of them the ones called mirabelles.

So I did something I seldom do. I made a pie. Walt had gone to the store where we are buying the new freezer to see what it looked like in real life — I had seen it a day or two earlier and we'd been discussing the pros and cons of buying it. I had a store-bought pie crust (une pâte feuilletée, pur beurre) in the fridge and it needed to be used.

First I had to remove the pits from all those little plums. Actually, it didn't take very long to get the job done. Then I just had to line a pie pan with the pastry. That took only a minute. I put a quarter-inch layer of almond powder on the bottom of the pie crust, and then I more or less arranged the little plum halves over that. A sprinkle of sugar and a few "dots" of butter finished the pie, and into the oven it went.

With the rest of the plums, I made jam (yes, there were plenty of them). We don't eat very much jam, really, but we can always make jelly-roll cakes with it, or eat it mixed into yogurt. It won't go to waste.

Late yesterday afternoon, I heard the bell ring out at the front gate. It was our neighbor the mayor with another big bowl of cherries. « Bonsoir Ken. J'espère que je ne t'embête pas », she said, pointing at the big bowl of plums she had in her other hand. I assured her that I was happy to have the plums. We chatted for a minute or two. Now I have to figure out what to do with another kilogram of prunes. Maybe I can, in fact, make prunes — dried plums, they call them now — in the dehydrator.

Un nouveau congélateur

Yesterday we bought a new freezer to put in the downstairs utility room. The old one, a Whirlpool freezer that still works fine, is 12 years old. It's been making me nervous. If it gave up the ghost, we'd really have to scramble to get and new one and save the contents of the old freezer. So we're getting a new one now, before it becomes some kind of emergency.

Here's the one we found and chose. We are buying it locally so that we will have some recourse with the merchant if there are problems.

It's a Hotpoint-Ariston model, an upright freezer (un congélateur armoire), it's called in French) with two shelves (at the top) and four drawers. It's frost-free, which in French is called froid ventilé (as opposed to froid statique) and dégivrage automatique rather than dégivrage manuel. In other words, it doesn't need to be defrosted. The old freezer is a chest-type appliance and uses froid statique so it requires manual defrosting periodically.

We plan to keep the old freezer too, for as long as it works. We are approaching our big harvest season, and there are so many tomatoes out in the garden that we'll need a lot of space for tomato sauce, for example. We are already freezing this year's green beans, and we have more zucchini than we can eat now.

The freezer dimensions are 169 x 60 x 68 in centimeters. That's 66½ inches tall, about 24 inches wide, and about 27 inches deep. The usable capacity is 222 liters, according to the manufacturer's specs. That's nearly eight cubic feet, which is about the same size as the old Whirlpool chest-style freezer.

Besides garden produce (kale, chard, collard greens, etc.), we also freeze leftovers from the kitchen and meats that we buy on special (sausages, pork roasts, beef steaks and stew meat, chicken, fish, and so on).

If you know anything specifically about Hotpoint-Ariston appliances, please leave a comment. It wouldn't be too late for us to cancel the order. And if you have information or opinions about upright freezers in general, I'd be glad to hear from you.

I am just reading on Wikipedia that Hotpoint is a brand now manufactured by the Italian firm Indesit, 60% of which is owned by Whirlpool. Appliances sold in the U.K. are branded as Hotpoint, and in France as Hotpoint-Ariston. I've read customer reviews and comments on this model (UH6F1CW) in both English and French, and while the great majority are positive they aren't very informative because they're mostly written by people who've only recently bought the freezer. They can't comment on long-term reliability. So you take your chances, as usual.