Zucchini Soup
Using and Preserving Zucchini and Summer Squash
Ingredients
- 1 medium onion chopped coarsely
- 1 clove garlic
- ¼ cup butter
- 6 medium zucchini chopped in one-inch cubes (approximately 3 cups)
- ½ cup beef or chicken broth
- ¼ teaspoon salt (sea salt or kosher salt are preferable)
- dash of pepper
- ½ cup milk
- ½ cup cream
Instructions
- Sauté the onion and butter until the onion is slightly transparent.
- Add the zucchini and broth and simmer until squash is very tender (approximately ten minutes). Puree in blender or food processor.
- Add remaining ingredients. If serving warm, serve immediately. If serving cold, chill for several hours.
Helpful Hints and Suggestions
- Most people who garden (and many who do not) are familiar with the pulp saga Zucchini Take Over the Garden! Zucchini is easy to grow, prolific, and nearly every summer will outstrip the family’s ability to eat all of it. And those who produce an abundance of zucchini often notice that at some point during summer even the most dependable of friends will begin to avoid them. What to do?
- Zucchini soup is a wonderful way to solve the problem. Make the soup up through step two. Freeze it. In the middle of winter, when the longing for garden produce overwhelms you or when you need something to serve for lunch, pull out the soup, defrost it, bring to a boil and add the remaining ingredients. Now you have something warm, nourishing, and as quick to make as soup in a can – perfect for warming up after shoveling snow.
- Consider using frozen soup to make a delicious Tuna Casserole.
A Little Bit About Zucchini
Zucchini is a ubiquitous summer squash that is also known as courgette in New Zealand and Great Britain. The scientific name Cucurbita pepo also includes other squash besides the green cylinder that most people are familiar with. Technically, zucchini is not a vegetable but a fruit as it is the immature swollen ovary of the female zucchini blossom.
Zucchini is cooked in a variety of ways including steaming, boiling, grilling, stuffing, barbecuing, frying, or baking. It is often included in breads, cakes, and soufflés as a main ingredient. The flower is also used in cooking; a favorite method for preparing the flower is to stuff it. Ideally, zucchini should be picked when it is between six and eight inches. The fruit has the best flavor when picked at this size. The larger the fruit, the poorer the texture, and the less flavor it has. If the plant is allowed to produce baseball-bat-sized squash, production will decline or end.
Zucchini is a very easy garden plant and certainly a great first plant for those who need to gain confidence as gardeners. The only failure or disease that zucchini seem prone to is abortion. Abortion occurs when the female blossoms are not properly pollinated which occurs in areas where the bee population and that of other pollinators are declining. When the plant aborts, it starts to grow a fruit, which then dries up or rots and never grows to maturity.
f your garden is going crazy and you need another way to preserve your abundance read the article How to Dehydrate Tomatoes.
soup made with green and yellow zucchini
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