putting the j in jjosh

Sometimes for her job my sister has to visit farms…and sometimes they load her up with free produce….today she stopped by and dropped off a big box of zuchhini, mexican zuchhini(?!), basil and squash flowers. Squash flowers are apparently really delicate, and there’s not really any way to store them, so you don’t find them in the supermarket or in restaurants.

I found a recipe online for squash flowers stuffed with cheese and basil, then fried in a batter made with beer and flour. The squash flowers were so weird. The first thing you have to do is open them up, pull out the stamens inside, and make sure there aren’t any bugs. And there were lots of bugs, lemme tell you.

So we cleaned them, stuffed them with a mixture of cream cheese, basil, sour cream and grated gruyere. Then made the batter, dipped them in and fried them in a pan. It was a lot of work, but they tasted pretty delicious.

Then again, I kind of feel like you could take shoe leather, fill it with cream cheese and sour cream, fry it, and it would be delicious, don’t you think? On a couple of them the filling leaked out as they were frying, and those flowers had the flavor of the flower come through a little more. Pretty delicious. Maxine documented the whole delicious experience.