I never meant for my first post to be about food.

2009 was to be our year of travel. But then at some point our house started peeling and a giant weed began growing out of the chimney. And it didn’t matter how many impatiens I planted or how well we trimmed the hedges, the leafy appendage and curling paint announced themselves like middle fingers waving in the wind.

So when I couldn’t stand the eyesores any longer, I took out a small loan and found a crew that would not only paint our house but perform landscape maintenance on our chimney.

And then the roof sprung a leak and our dog grew a 5^th toe that turned out to be cancer.

Needless to say, the small loan turned into a huge loan and now my husband & I feel we need to embrace a life (even more so than before) of stay-cations and frugality and resourcefulness and all those other buzz words that are so in vogue right now.

So why is there a zucchini in the trash can?

I have yet to meet someone who has ever paid for a zucchini -- It’s like the most free vegetable on earth. Especially this time of year, if you hang out with someone with a vegetable garden for too long, you’re going to find a zucchini riding in the passenger seat of your car with no idea how it got there. You can sit there wondering how it fastened its own seatbelt but eventually you’re gonna have to figure out what to do with it.

My mother has a dining room table full of zucchini. She gives me this defeated yet crazed look and begs for me to “take some zucchini. Please. There are just so many of them,” like she won a game show where the prize was a passel of hungry kittens or something.

So there I inevitably am with the zucchini riding shotgun & looking at me all expectantly while I'm thinking of all the zucchini bread I am gonna bake. And that’s it. That’s all I got.

In this age of multi-tasking & efficiency, isn’t there anything else I can do with a zucchini? Chopping that stuff in my tiny baby Cuisinart takes work, people, like pushing a button 8 times. The most shameful part is that I almost always have zucchini that yields way more than what my recipe requires. And since I can't be bothered to replenish the other ingredients... in the trash the excess zucchini goes!

I end up feeling wasteful & ungrateful -- because dammit I am supposed to be making something outta nuthin’ cause I got bills and shit!

So instead of making trips to the beach, I spent my summer making loan payments and feeling guilty about nature's plentiful bouty.

Zucchini: 95% water and approximately 85% my nemesis.