Too Much Zucchini? This Salad Can Save the Day

New York Times

25-06-2025

The first time I had a real relationship with zucchini, it was with No. 10 cans of stewed green and yellow summer squash swimming in their juices, pale and flavorless, save for the distinct taste of tin and sadness. Squash is ubiquitous in the South for nearly all of late spring, summer and well into autumn, but my stint at Park Place Family Restaurant in Dahlonega, Ga., my first official job, informed a good decade of believing I hated it in any form.
Recipe: Zucchini and Fennel Salad
I would open those cans with an industrial-size tabletop opener, the kind that took my whole 15-year-old body to lift, clank down and crank. I would unceremoniously pour the squash into pans to heat, without any further seasoning, then transfer them into hotel pans to be kept warm over steamy water on the buffet. The summer squash lived next to mashed potatoes, which were made from scratch with great care, and the green beans, which were not. (They, too, came from cans with a desperate air about them.) It was the early 1990s, an era when cruising the town square and working at a buffet during the summer were about all there was to do to keep out of trouble.
Fast-forward about 10 years, a kid on my hip, a makeshift bakery in my Nashville apartment, and I found myself flirting with the vegetable, seemingly more abundant than ever in the hills of Tennessee. I grated this bounty into quick breads, cookies and pie filling (after all the water was well squeezed out). I often treated it like a cucumber, using it raw in salads and playing around with canning and pickling it in various brines, including red Kool-Aid. (Koolickles — they're a Southern thing. Let us live!)
Here's the one experiment that stuck: Riffing on a recipe every Southerner has or loves some version of, I kept on my habit of treating summer squash like a cucumber and, one day, casually made what we know in the South as refrigerator pickles with them.
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