Cold spicy rice noodles with smashed zucchini
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This week, I’m holding on.
Autumn has arrived. At my local coop, the central tomato display was replaced, seemingly overnight, with winter squash (what we call pumpkin in Australia) and sweet potato. But I still have zucchini and corn in my fridge (courtesy of my CSA share last week) so I’m running with that for a while longer. Stay with me.
Don’t dismiss late summer vegetables. They are mature, bursting with flavour. I especially love the tomatoes during September in New York. They are on the verge of being overripe, which means their flavour is exaggerated - sweeter, more savoury, almost syrupy. Snap up punnets of sun golds or cherry tomatoes and make my ‘walk away tomato sauce’ (page 445), the spiced tomato jam (page 446) or the Portuguese tomato rice (page 462) in Tenderheart.
My middle child Dash has strong (and often incendiary) opinions about vegetables. Adverse to certain textures, particularly slippery or slimy ones, he describes zucchini as an imposter, a less impressive version of cucumber.
I disagree, of course, but my kids are old enough that their opinions are their own and I shouldn’t even attempt to sway them. In reality, having an opinion is a good thing and I welcome their point of view. Fortunately for me, they are teenagers so they are not short of opinions.
Even though they are physically similar, and belong to the same plant family, known as Cucurbitaceae, zucchini and cucumber are very different ingredients. When cooked, zucchini are sweet and earthy, with a creamy flesh. Raw cucumbers are crisp and fresh.
I used Dash’s outlandish claims about zucchini as inspiration, opting for it in a dish where cucumber would traditionally be employed.
I smashed zucchini. And I liked what happened.
Raw zucchini doesn’t have much flavour. It needs to be cooked to bring out sweetness and earthiness. So here, I sprinkled it with salt to draw out moisture and flavor. The salt also tenderizes the flesh, just enough to transform it from hard to crunchy.
I tossed the zucchini with cold rice noodles, and a spicy and acidic seasoning sauce. This dish is in the spirit of cold Sichuan noodles, similar to my cold peanut noodle dish, but less nutty. I love the firm bite of the zucchini, not juicy like cucumber, but more assertive.