Zucchini

Primavera is Italian for “spring,” and that’s what this dish tastes like. It was created at Le Cirque, New York’s famed restaurant, in the 1970s because some high-flying and health-conscious patrons complained that they wanted lighter and healthier dishes. The original version was labor-intensive because you had to not only dice all the vegetables, but also blanch them in different pots. My version cuts out the blanching, and instead you roast the vegetables and end up with a sweet, caramelized, intensely flavored bite. Consider doubling the recipe; it only gets better the next day.

I love to prepare and serve stuffed peppers because they make such a beautiful presentation; when you cut into them and the delicious filling spills out, it’s like getting a present. My mother is also partial to stuffed peppers, which she fills with vegetables, meat, pasta—almost anything.

I know not everyone puts zucchini on their top ten vegetable list, but when you coat zucchini chunks in a delicious Parmesan crust and broil them, trust me, most people will become zucchini lovers. You can cook sweet potatoes or carrots the same way, but zucchini cooks more quickly.

It’s hard to believe a plate this beautiful is so easy to make. Crudi means “raw” and the freshness of raw vegetables is especially welcome as an accompaniment to a heavier pasta. The key to this dish is creating long, graceful ribbons of the raw zucchini; they should look almost like pale green fettuccine noodles.

Rich-tasting, thick, and so flavorful—no one will miss the meat in this stew.

This recipe is a great example of how to prepare a classic French dinner in minutes and in only one pan.

Roasting vegetables usually takes 45 minutes or longer. The technique we use here takes only 15 minutes, yet provides excellent slow-roasted flavor. For a change, omit the pasta and serve the vegetables as a side dish.

With its Old World flavors and tempting aroma, this versatile dish is a big hit at potluck suppers. Depending on whether you use the main recipe or one of the variations, you can create an entrée, a one-dish meal, or a side dish from the same basic ingredients

Lemon-tinged cream cheese tempers peppery arugula in this nutrition-packed entrée.

A seasoned cornmeal crust makes the zucchini so crisp that you could easily mistake it for deep-fried. Try the zucchini and dip for a party appetizer as well as for a side dish.

Unlike many other poppy seed dressings, the one used in this fresh vegetable salad is sweet and sour.

You’ll be happy to eat veggies for dessert when you taste these cakelike brownies. Zucchini is the surprise ingredient.

With their slightly caramelized flavor, roasted vegetables make a wonderful spread. Serve with pieces of toasted whole-grain pita rounds or baked tortilla chips.

Gina: If you’ve never spent a summer in the South, then you don’t know heat like we know heat! Baby, this dish is perfect for a sultry Memphis evening, because it requires very little cooking. The shrimp and zucchini are grilled briefly, and the rest of the ingredients are simply heated in olive oil for a few minutes, to coax out their flavor. Then everything is tossed with pasta shells, and you are done, sugar. We call for cherry tomatoes, but feel free to use Sweet 100, currant, or pear tomatoes, or any other small tomatoes available at your local farmers’ market. Best of all, you’ll walk away from the table feeling satisfied but not too full. Choose a nice Chardonnay or Pinot Grigio, and you are set.

The secret to bringing out the flavor of the zucchini without making it soggy is to cook it whole for just long enough to soften it. If you don’t have cherry tomatoes, cut regular tomatoes into chunks more or less the size of the sliced zucchini.

Picking the mussels from their shells before you toss the pasta together with the sauce means less work for your guests, but feel free to skip that step. If you do skip it, put the pasta on to boil just before you start the sauce. Both will be done at about the same time.

Sprinkling the onions with salt as they cook not only seasons them, but extracts some of the water and intensifies their flavor. Keep the water hot before adding it to the soup, as described below, and you won’t interrupt the cooking—it will flow smoothly from start to end. Remember this when braising meats like the short ribs on page 218, or when making risotto. You can use the method outlined below—bringing the beans to a boil, then soaking them in hot water for an hour—anytime you want to cook beans without soaking them overnight, or anytime you’ve forgotten to soak them a day in advance. It works especially well here because, by soaking the pork along with the beans, you kill two birds with one stone. (I soak the dried or cured pork to remove some of the intense curing-and-smoking flavor. If you like it intense, just rinse the pork under cold water before adding it to the soup.)

Sometimes I peel eggplants completely, sometimes not at all. Leaving the peel on adds a slightly bitter taste—which I like—but also helps the eggplant hold its shape after you cut it into cubes or slices. If you want the best of both worlds, remove thick stripes of peel from the eggplant, leaving half the peel intact. Caponata can last several days in the refrigerator and is even better after marinating for a day. It is best eaten at room temperature, so remove it from the refrigerator about 2 hours before serving. Caponata is usually served as part of an antipasto assortment, although it makes a wonderful summer contorno, or side dish, to grilled meats or fish.

When my mother made fried zucchini for us, she would slice the zucchini lengthwise into 1/ 4-inch slices. Sometimes she would flour them, dip them in egg batter, cover them well with bread crumbs, and fry them, as I do here. But sometimes she would just dip them in flour and eggs and fry them. I liked them both ways. The ones without bread crumbs I make often for a vegetable buffet or antipasto. After they are fried and drained, I roll them like a jelly roll and serve them just like that. The best zucchini to use for this—and most—recipes are small ones, about 6 inches long, with bright skins and a firm texture. Zucchini of this size are called “fancy” in the restaurant business. You’ll see them labeled like that in some markets as well. Fry the zucchini in batches for better results. Overcrowding the oil when frying zucchini, or for that matter anything, lowers the temperature of the oil drastically, and that causes a lot of problems. First, the food becomes poached and not fried, and absorbs much more oil. The zucchini pieces will stick to each other and cook unevenly, without the nice, crispy crust which is one of the reasons we fry in the first place.

This is for the pasta shunners out there who still find themselves pining for a big, gooey serving of lasagna. Nothing can really replace the toothsome texture of fresh pasta, but given the amount of “bad” carbs a serving of pasta contains, it’s understandable that some choose to avoid it altogether. Thin slices of zucchini and eggplant stand in for the pasta in this lasagna, made with fat-free ricotta and low-fat marinara sauce. It all adds up to a truly delish alternative to traditional high-calorie lasagna.