Greenmarket find: zucchini blossoms

While gathering the ingredients for yesterday's salad demo, I came across these exciting goodies. Zucchini blossoms at Yuno's Farm. They were laid out on a white handkerchief in a wicker basket, which showcased their bright greens and oranges perfectly. I may have accidentally yelled, "Oh!"

In the image above, they are laid out on my yellow cutting board. They are slightly worse for the wear for their travels during the day, but they still gave off their pungent squashy zucchini smell. And even wilted, I think they look great.

Given an undamaged blossom on a leisurely day, I would pipe in a seasoned soft cheese filling and fry these guys in batter. As it was, on a 90 degree day after cooking at the market, I went for quick and easy. I just stuffed them with plain goat cheese, dipped them in a simple tempura batter, then I pan-fried and salted them. Pretty good.

On second thought, quick and easy may be an exaggeration, but I did take shortcuts. Rather than teasing the blossoms open from the top, I slit each blossom up the side to remove the stamen, and stuffed tiny columns of rolled goat cheese into the slice. The cheese was substantial enough to hold the blossoms together when I wrapped the leaves back around.

The tempura batter was just equal parts flour and seltzer with a dash of salt. Would a more highly seasoned preparation have been tastier? Perhaps. But sitting down to stuffed fried zucchini blossoms after a long day in the heat was pretty close to perfection.