It’s time to pick next week’s featured ingredient! Can you feel the excitement? Are you shivering with anticipation? Me too, me too!
(please don’t be cheez whiz please don’t be cheez whiz please…)
And the winner is….
Congratulations, Jess, who submitted the following comment:
As a college student with little to no experience in cooking, there is no way I’m passing this beautiful project by. I have a lot of problems with vegetables, but specifically I’m interested in zucchini. It seems to have potential, but I’m stumped as how to cook it.
Oh, Jess. You should see the look of horror on my husband’s face right now. Next to school buses (tell you that story another time, maybe), zucchini might be his most dreaded enemy!
But no matter! I love it, and I will do my best to show you some things to do with it next week. Even if that means I will be eating the results myself! (Jess, please leave me a comment with any special dietary parameters you have for this experiment.)
So, goodbye, kale, hello zucchini!
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Which concludes this first week of Food You Don’t Know What to Do With! I really enjoyed myself–the cooking, the thinking about you all, the writing–but now I want to know what you think. Going forward, I imagine a format similar to the one you just saw, wherein I post two recipes a week, plus a selection of links and maybe one other post related or tangentially related to the ingredient at hand. On Friday of every week, I will pull another name from the comment bowl to determine the following week’s ingredient. So far all of the comments happened after the initial post, but if you would like to throw your hat into the ring at any time, feel free to comment on any post in the series and I will be sure to include you.
How does that sound to everyone?
Thanks again, to everyone who has participated! Please keep commenting and sharing as you see fit. xoxo
Sheila squillante 
Aw yeah, I’m so excited! If you don’t want to eat it, I can take one for the team 😛 No special dietary requirements.
Oh, we’re ALL going to eat it! (even you, husband) 😉
Oh Sheila, I am enjoying reading these posts! Please include something about those scary giant zucchinis growing out there. We fed our last 4 to the sheep. I kept thinking maybe I can shred these…
Hi Marie! I’m so glad to see you here! Those are some lucky sheep. Shredding sounds interesting. My hope is that I’ll be able to come up with something maybe even your brother–avowed zucchini-hater that he is–will…well, at least tolerate! Love to you guys!
Your plans for posts sound great to me. Love your cooking tips and the stories.
Thanks, Charlie!
Hi Sheila! I’ve got a question for you: Do you have any reading (in addition to your blog, obviously) that you can recommend on the subject of food? The only authors that come to mind for me are Anthony Bourdaine and Michael Pollan–but I know the list must be longer and more varied than that. Thanks! (The blog is great–and great writing makes me want to 1. keep reading, and 2. write for myself, and in the case of this blog, cook a lot!)
Hi Charlie! One of my favorite food books is The Man Who Ate Everything, by Jeffrey Steingarten. I also love Ruth Reichl’s food memoirs, and have heard very good things about Michael Ruhlman’s books, too. Maybe I’ll do a post or a link list with some other ideas. Oh, and David Lebovitz has a fun and yummy book called The Sweet Life in Paris. Yeah. There are lots! Happy reading!
Thanks much!