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Did you know zucchini descends from squashes first domesticated in Mesoamerica over 7000 years ago, but the zucchini itself was bred in Milan in the late 19th century.
Welcome to the Chop Chop Podcast.
I'm Sally Sampson.
And I'm Harry Rosenblum.
Our mission at Chop Chop is to enrich the lives of families by inspiring and teaching them to cook and eat real food together.
This month's topic is zucchini, a squash that grows so abundantly those who grow it cannot possibly eat it all themselves.
Let's make cookies!
We'll be talking with a mother-son team who are growing zucchini this year, as well as one of the organizers of the West Stockbridge Massachusetts Annual Zucchini Festival.
And we'll hear about a wonderful book called Zora's Zucchini from author Catherine Pryor.
Harry, I'm intrigued with growing zucchini, but I never have.
Have you ever grown it?
Yes, I have.
Zucchini and squash plants can get very large.
They take up a lot of room in the garden.
So be careful not to plant too many things right next to where your zucchini are going to come up.
Another thing I find really neat is that there is a bee called the squash bee that feeds exclusively on the nectar of squash plants like zucchini.
They start their foraging early in the morning, when the flowers first open, and are usually up much earlier than honeybees and other insects.
That's cool.
When I was 14, I became a vegetarian and my mother, who was a great cook, encouraged me to learn how to cook.
I'm not sure why, but the thing I landed on was sauteing zucchini.
I made it all the time, slicing it into coins and cooking it over high heat with olive oil, salt and pepper.
Actually, maybe it was butter.
I cooked it until the edges were really brown and delicious.
That's really funny because that's exactly the same way that my son Ruben, first cooked zucchini as well, at about the same age.
And I'm not sure where he picked it up.
Hmm.
It's odd that we both sliced it into coins, and especially funny for me to have landed on zucchini, since I grew up in New York City and it wasn't about it being readily available in my backyard.
Right.
Ruben first cooked it that way a few years ago, when we grew it and of course had lots and lots of it.
Maybe the squash sort of told you how to cook it.
It makes sense that you'd slice it into rounds.
They fit well in a pan and they'll all cook at the same rate if you slice them the same thickness.
When I cook them, I like to slice them really thin.
The thinner they are, the more char you get.
Here's our top 10 things to do with zucchini.
Curried zucchini soup.
Zucchini fritters.
Zucchini bread.
Spiralized zucchini.
Grilled zucchini.
Roasted zucchini, which is sort of like grilling, but in the oven.
Sauteed zucchini coins.
Stir-fried zucchini with tofu.
Three sister salad, which is zucchini, beans, and corn.
And give it away.
Do you wanna hear a joke?
What did one zucchini say to another?
You look gorgeous.
I wanted to hear from someone who is actually growing zucchini this year, so I reached out to my friend Katie and her sons Wyatt and Rye, who were in their garden the other day.
I hear that you guys are growing zucchini this year.
How many zucchini plants do you have in your garden?
15 or 16.
The reality is we have three that are growing successfully and about two that I started from seeds.
And for whatever reason, I started them all together and two of them have just not grown.
They're about three inches high.
But one of them has completely overgrown all of its support and structure and is taking over, I think, everything.
Awesome.
So why did you choose to plant zucchini in your garden this year?
It's really healthy.
Yeah, can you tell me more about that, Wyatt?
Can you tell me what you like about zucchini?
I like that it can also make your muscles strong.
Nice.
And do you have to have strong muscles to lift them?
Do you have very large zucchini?
Yes.
We like have zucchini that's taking over our whole garden.
How do you know when it's time to pick the zucchini in your garden?
When it's like as big as it needs to be, and we even sometimes forget what time we need to pick it, and pick it when it's way bigger.
I see.
And so do you use it for different things when you pick it at different sizes?
Yeah.
Like what?
We sometimes use it for zucchini bread.
Oh, yum.
I love zucchini bread.
When they're small and tender, sometimes we just saute them.
And when they're big and huge, then it's time for like zucchini bread.
Zucchini ricotta pancakes.
Amazing.
Do you guys have anything else you want to tell me about growing zucchini in your garden?
The zucchini we grow are even bigger than my brother Rye.
Thanks, Katie, Wyatt, and Rye.
It was great to see you guys, and may your garden be ever bountiful.
Did you know?
Did you know?
Did you know?
Zucchini is a type of summer squash.
It is a versatile and nutritious fruit that is often treated as a vegetable.
It is rich in vitamins A and C and a good source of potassium and fiber.
Zucchini also contains antioxidants.
I'm Ruben, and we are here with... Charlie.
And we're going to ask five questions.
You ready?
Yeah.
Number one, what did you have for breakfast today?
I had ham and American cheese.
If you were stuck on a desert island and didn't have many choices, what would you like to eat?
Chocolate chip pancakes.
Number three, is there a food you'd like to try but haven't yet?
No.
What is the weirdest food combo that you like?
Carrots with ketchup.
I have to try that.
That actually sounds pretty good.
Number five, what do you like to cook?
I don't usually cook.
Only if I'm helping.
I can only cook.
Catherine, welcome to the Chop Shop Podcast.
We're really thrilled to have you.
I love your book, Zora's Zucchini.
It's so charming and pretty, but also it's got this really important message.
And I'm wondering if you can tell our listeners what it's about.
Zora's Zucchini is one of my favorite books I've ever written.
And I think part of it is because, although Zora is an imaginary character, she is based on real events.
So in Zora's Zucchini there is a kid who has a problem that many of us who've grown zucchini have experienced.
Where they you plant a few little plants in the spring and then come August you have more zucchini than you can possibly eat.
And so Zora tries to eat it with her family.
She gives it away to the neighbors and she still has more zucchini than they can eat.
And she doesn't want any of her zucchini to go to waste.
So she ends up creating a veggie swap for her neighborhood, where everyone who has extra produce in their gardens can bring it and swap it.
And everybody gets to taste a little of this and that.
It's such a great idea.
I love it.
I was giving zucchini to anyone who would take it.
And one night I had a dream about a little girl who had the same problem I did and she was giving away zucchini from a little red wagon.
I woke up, I sat on my porch at four in the morning in my pajamas and I wrote the very first draft of this story.
The only problem was I couldn't think of how to end it.
So I had the beginning.
She had this problem of too much zucchini.
I had the middle.
She was giving it away to everybody.
But I didn't know how to end the book.
And at one point I had something like 40 saved drafts of this story on my computer because I didn't know how to end it.
And my editor said if you can't finish it by New Year's, let's put it away and work on something else.
And I said, OK.
And that year I happened to go home and visit my family for the holidays.
And my sisters reminded me of something we did as kids called a sister swap.
Where, if we had clothes we were tired of or books we had already read or, you know, maybe a poster in our room we were tired of looking at, we would every so often put all this stuff out on the living room floor and swap.
And we would take what we wanted.
And it was just a fun way to get new stuff and mix up what was in our rooms.
And when my sister reminded me of that, I was like, that's it.
That's what Zorro would do.
She would have a swap.
And I wrote the ending on a napkin I found in the glove compartment of my car.
It's great.
Yeah. typed it up, sent it to my editor and he said, yep, that's how this story ends.
And I actually got to go to a real life kids food swap in Portland when I was promoting the book.
So it's a real thing that kids do and a lot of fun.
Yeah.
Can you talk a little bit about beyond the end of the book, where you talk about sort of giving it away in a bigger way?
Absolutely.
So I think that it's such an interesting problem, this concept of having too much food.
On the one hand, it seems like it's not a problem to have too much of.
But if you're like me and most people and you hate seeing food get wasted, it is a problem.
I mean, we know that something like A third of the food in the world is wasted.
And that means that all of the time and resources and energy that went into growing that are also wasted.
The fuel that went to ship it around the world are wasted.
I really love to avoid food waste.
And so there's several things that people can do if you have that fun problem of having too much food.
First of all, you can donate it.
I mean.
One thing that I always make a point to do is to try to share it with friends and neighbors if I have too much from my garden.
There's also a lot of food banks that will accept... fresh produce donations.
Fresh produce is one of the hardest things for food banks to acquire and store.
So having this really delicious peak season produce is fantastic for people who need a little extra food on their tables.
We think about food banks as having truckloads of zucchini.
They would take a small amount.
Everyone should check with their local food bank to see what they're looking for.
And different food banks have different requirements.
Can they take it from a home garden?
Does it have to be from a store or a farm?
Everybody's a little bit different.
So if you are wanting to do something like donate it to a food bank, I would reach out to them and just find out if they will take it.
The other thing you can always do is preserve it.
So I tend to freeze a lot of zucchini.
There's a lot of things that you can do with that regard.
I've also seen schools do some really fun things like host a harvest festival for the neighborhood.
The school invites the parents and everybody to come and take a little of that and a little of this.
It's just a great way to get a lot of people involved in what's going on in the garden.
I love the message.
Zora Zucchini came out of your experience and also out of a dream.
What's your advice on sort of turning it into a story, writing it down?
Yeah, that's a great and very fun conversation to have.
I always tell people I became a writer when I was seven years old, when I wrote my very first short story in second grade.
And I am forever grateful to my second grade teacher, Miss Lamb, for that.
For telling me I could tell a story.
And so what I like to tell kids is that a story requires a few different things.
One, you have to have an idea.
And ideas can come from all sorts of places.
They can come from real life.
They can come from your imagination.
They can come from history.
They can come from dreams.
Find something that is interesting to you and then set your world in that place.
The other thing that stories have to have and this is a really hard part to do.
When you like your characters, stories have to have a problem.
Most of our favorite stories that we want to read again and again and again involve a character failing multiple times before they succeed.
So you have to give your character an obstacle to overcome.
I would say the most important thing is just having fun with it, not being worried about what the outcome would be, but just enjoy spending time in a fictional world that feels like a happy place to you.
Thank you to author Catherine Pryor, whose book Zora's Zucchini is one of our giveaways this month.
I love the idea of a food swap.
I've always wanted to do something like this with my garden, because I find when I'm growing things, there's often something that grows really well and you have too much of it to use yourself.
I kind of like the idea of swapping raw produce almost better than anything.
But obviously, you can also swap cooked food.
You could do bread.
You could do jam.
You could do salad.
You could really do anything.
But somehow, there's something super appealing to me about vegetables.
Yeah, I think it's because there's something about someone having grown it or, in the case of Bread or Jam, the person made it.
Right.
And that's really nice to share with other people.
Did you know?
Did you know?
Did you know?
The longest zucchini on record was over eight feet long, and the heaviest zucchini was over 64 pounds.
Our recipe this month is curried zucchini soup.
When I moved to Boston, I used to drive from Boston to New York where my parents lived a lot.
On the way, I would often stop at a store in Connecticut called Hay Day.
I always bought their curried zucchini soup and eventually figured out how to make it myself.
And here it is.
We'll see you next time.
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Clean the countertop.
Gather all your kitchen gear and ingredients and put them on the counter.
Scrub all the fruits and vegetables and lay them out on a clean dish towel to dry.
Prepare your ingredients, which means you may have to do something before you get started with the instructions.
One of the best parts of this recipe is that you don't even need zucchini to make it.
If you prefer cauliflower, broccoli, or carrots, or just happen to have those on hand, those are a great substitute for the zucchini.
First, put a soup pot on the stove and set the heat to medium.
When it's hot, add the butter, and when the butter has melted, add the onion carrot celery, curry powder garlic, ginger root and zucchini.
And cook this partially covered until the vegetables are tender.
This will take about 20 to 25 minutes.
If you don't have curry powder, you can use a combination of spices like cumin coriander, turmeric and chili powder, which is what I did.
Next, add the rice and chicken stock and bring it to a boil.
Lower the heat to low and cook partially covered until the rice is tender for about 45 minutes.
Set the pot aside so it can cool for about 10 minutes.
Using a slotted spoon, remove about half of the solids and put them in a blender.
Do not fill it more than halfway.
Cover the top of the blender with a pot holder or dish towel.
Then turn the blender to the lowest speed and process until smooth, adding more cooking liquid as necessary.
Then transfer the pureed soup to a large bowl or an additional pot.
Puree the rest of the solids and add them to the bowl or pot along with the remaining cooking liquid.
Lastly, add milk or cream if you like and stir it well.
Serve it right away or cover the soup and refrigerate it for up to three days.
You can even serve this soup chilled or hot.
I enjoyed a bowl just as I finished preparing it and added a slice of bread for dipping.
It was creamy and the flavors were vibrant.
If you make this recipe, tell us how you like it.
Thanks, Della.
It sounds so delicious.
Sally, what ways can you adjust this recipe if, say, you don't really like rice or curry?
This recipe is so easily adaptable.
First of all, Hay Day also sold cream of curried carrot, cream of curried broccoli, cream of curried cauliflower.
So you could certainly use a different vegetable.
If you don't like rice, you could just eliminate it, or you could put in a half cup of cooked potatoes, or you could put in half a cup of day-old bread.
If you don't like dairy milk, you could also eliminate it, or you could put in oatmeal, rice milk, etc.
If you don't like curry, just leave it out.
Wow.
What a super easy and versatile recipe.
Do you want to hear a joke?
What's a zucchini's favorite sport?
Squash.
Thanks so much, Chris, for joining me from the West Stockbridge Zucchini Festival.
Can you introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about the festival?
Yeah.
So my name is Chris.
I am one of the co-organizers of the festival.
West Star Pigeon Zucchini Festival.
The festival has been around for a while.
It was started in, and it's a little debated, but 2003, 2004.
And it's really a big labor of love and community effort.
I was looking at the schedule for this year's festival and, just to let listeners know, this year, if you happen to be in the Massachusetts area, the festival is happening on August 9th of this year, 2025.
And the schedule is really packed.
I was amazed to see all the different things that you guys have put together in the festival.
And I wanted to ask about a few of them.
Some of them, I think, are things that people would expect, right?
There's a way off.
So biggest zucchini obviously wins.
In the past few years, what's the largest zucchini you've seen at the festival?
Last year's zucchini came in at around 10 pounds.
The biggest zucchini is kind of like the first prize, blue ribbon prize for the biggest zucchini.
But we also have most unusual zucchini and then a prize for best looking zucchini as well.
One of my favorite activities or things that goes on at the festival is called the Zucchini Compost Catapult.
And so our volunteers go around town and collect donations from supermarkets and farmers of zucchini and squash that are kind of on their way out.
And years and years ago a volunteer had built a catapult out of like a tire, iron and a long metal rod.
So at the festival, you can go and launch a zucchini into a compost bin.
And that's...
That's a pretty fun thing.
Always been a huge hit.
All the different things that we do throughout the day are super fun.
Zucchini decorating.
There's zig-zag-zo, which is...
I love it.
Do you have any tips for listeners who might have an idea that they want to throw their own food festival in their town, or even their own zucchini festival?
My biggest tip is just knowing that you can do it no matter what.
The great thing in my experience of being a volunteer for the festival is that we kind of meet each other where we're at with the planning and the programming.
One year you might have a little less.
The next year you might have a little more.
Some years you might not have as many donations coming in, and other years you might be able to generate more, a decent amount of money to fund all of these other fun things.
And so I think my biggest tip is kind of being flexible with what you're doing and knowing that ultimately what's, really fun and has been for the entire history of the Zucchini Festival is that ultimately it's about a bunch of people getting together and doing something for each other to share with other people beyond our immediate community.
And so at the end of the day, regardless of what you get together and if they're like trip ups and things that might have to shift and move, it's just always a fun time, no matter what it is, because that's kind of the spirit that everyone puts into it.
Chris Powell and the other organizers put in a ton of work.
So if you're in the western Massachusetts area, put the West Stockbridge Zucchini Festival on your calendar.
This year, it's happening on Saturday, August 9th.
And you can check out the schedule at WSZucchiniFest.org.
I love that it's such a community effort to put on this fun celebration where everyone chips in and has a party all about zucchini.
Thanks for listening to the Chop Chop podcast.
Here at Chop Chop, we celebrate ingredients, kitchen tools and recipes, while having a great time in the kitchen.
Chop Chop family is celebrating our 15th birthday all this year.
And our next episode is all about tomatoes.
So make sure to tune in for things like BLTs and lots more.
For more content, check out chopchopfamilyorg and follow us on social media at Chop Chop Kids for your chance to win a copy of Zora's Zucchini and a copy of the West Stockbridge Zucchini Cookbook.
This podcast is written produced, edited and hosted by Harry Rosenblum and Sally Sampson, with engineering by Matt Patterson.
Stella Maiden is our intrepid intern.
Shout out to Wyatt, Bowie, and Frank.
Thanks for adding your voices to our show.
We had a great time speaking with Catherine Pryor, author of Zorro Zucchini, and Chris Palmer of the West Stockbridge Zucchini Fest.
Music in this episode by Juanitos, Mr. Smith, Beat Mechanic, MV Rassley and Lisa Hammer.
We're also a part of Kids Listen, the number one place for finding great podcasts for kids of all ages.
You can learn more at kidslisten.org.
And don't forget to sign up for the Chop Shop newsletter to get more recipes every month.
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Thanks for listening.
