I’m not a night person. I’m not a cat person. I am not, historically, a confrontation person — though I’m working on it. I was never a runner, and I had very much made my peace with that, until I joined a small running group and managed to complete the Beaujolais half-marathon last year (despite the many stops along the way, including, yes, official wine-sipping breaks).
We all have a list of things we’ve decided aren’t for us. They find their way into old filing cabinets in our brains and rest there. It’s easier to keep them shut than to look inside and find you were wrong.
For a long time, I was not a zucchini person.
I’m not proud of this, given my role as a champion for all produce. Give peas a chance and all that. But zucchini and I were not to be. They didn’t have heft, they lacked immediate sweetness or bitterness, they offered no drama. I cooked them, occasionally, and enjoyed them, here and there, but I was always somehow missing the point. Raw, they were watery and bland. Cooked casually, they became a paler version of themselves. I didn’t exactly dislike them; I just dropped them into that mental filing cabinet. And there they sat, patient and undemanding, like Julia Roberts in “Notting Hill,” saying, “I’m also just a zucchini, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love me.” And I didn’t listen.
Until I started holidaying on the Greek island of Kea in the Cyclades.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, my family spent many summers on Kea. Our days organized themselves around dusty road trips to remote beaches, fried fish and Greek salads in a nearby shack, black coffees in the white-walled old town. Then, we’d shop for ingredients and spend long evenings cooking and drinking. Dinners began at 10 and ended somewhere around midnight. The children grew incrementally taller each summer.
What you could get on the island was the opposite of what my local London greengrocer offered: There were no pineapples, no strawberries, no apples or artichokes, none of the four types of green beans and 12 varieties of salads. There was only a small selection of fruit and vegetables, imperfect to look at but beyond perfect to sink your teeth into. Bumpy, uneven tomatoes that collapsed under a knife. Peaches you could eat only over a sink. And zucchini everywhere, pale-skinned and piled high at roadside stalls, appearing on every taverna table in one form or another.
In other words, zucchini forced themselves upon me, and life became better for it.
The most unforgettable were actually prepared in the simplest way. Sliced an inch or so thick, boiled, smothered in magnificent olive oil, topped with a few thin slices of raw young garlic and finally sprinkled with dried oregano. These were a revelation. Or another version, prepared as I do here, where thinly sliced zucchini roast alongside chicken legs, collapsing as they turn creamy and soft. Or stuffed with rice and herbs and baked alongside tomatoes — with lots of oil and garlic again — the skins going translucent in the oven.
A caper, shallot and basil vinaigrette cuts through the richness of this chicken dish.Credit…Rachel Vanni for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.
I think I had been approaching zucchini all wrong. Too fast, sometimes, with mistaken expectations, treating them like something they weren’t. Given heat and time and, most important, good olive oil and garlic, they do something entirely different. Their natural sweetness, concentrated through the cooking, magnifies — and somehow moderates — the oil’s pepperiness and the garlic’s spicy pungency. The perfect marriage of three things that become a glorious one.
And so it was that, on Kea, I discovered a combination I now cook more than almost any other.
I just wonder what else is still rattling away in that mental filing cabinet, what else is tucked away under tabs labeled “not for me.”
Perhaps that’s the quiet quality of cooking, and of traveling, too. They tell us to look around and reconsider.
So yes, I am now, unambiguously, a zucchini person.
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