Zucchini Parmesan

 Love eggplant? You go, sistah. I'm afraid I am simply not a fan of eggplant, but I'll zucchinify anything, and thus "Zucchini Parmesan" (NYT Cooking) was right up my alley as an alternative to eggplant parmesan (cauliflower parmesan is also an option!). And zucchini parmesan was mighty tasty, and I recommend it.

Pre-oven:

Post-oven:

I cooked the zucchini about 25 minutes, and found I needed more parmesan. I used a 3-quart dish and so only did two layers, not three. My backup dancers, especially the taller one, gave this one the thumbs-up.

I've actually been doing a lot of cooking lately but not a lot of blogging, so following is a quick rundown of a few other noteworthy recipes:

• Savory Corn Fritters (NYT Cooking): as is my signature, I screwed these up, by halving only some of the ingredients (the corn, cheese, and scallions). By some miracle they still turned out not only edible, but pretty good!
• Tomato-Cream (Vodka) Sauce for Pasta (AllRecipes): I used this recipe because I didn't have cream but I did have milk and butter. I also used fresh, peeled tomatoes rather than canned. It turned out fine, but not as good as a recipe with cream.
• Hot Buttered Soft Pretzels (King Arthur): You're going to be reading more about this in a future blog post after I make them again, but I'm recording here for my own reference that you'll want to make the pretzel strings a lot longer than you think you need to, and so they should look strangely skinny for their size before they go into the oven, but they'll puff up and out as they cook. And yeah, they're delish.
• Skinny Cauliflower Mac n’ Cheese (EatFitFuel): I have tried other cauliflower mac and cheese recipes, and this one's bonuses are the Gruyere and the crunch Panko topping. I believe it may be my fave.
• The Best Clam Chowder (NYT Cooking): Mollusks have a smaller climate footprint than other seafood and poultry, pigs, and cows! So it's okay to indulge in them sometimes. Dice those taters quite small (1/2-inch or less), or it will take longer than 15 minutes for them to cook. The recipe didn't specify whether to peel the potatoes, but I am glad I did. Clams are a pain to remove from their shells; I used an oyster knife but it did take time. I used cherrystone clams. I thought the final product was divine, although my backup dancers were less impressed.

I also recently revisited an oldie but a goodie: pasta with avocado sauce.

Finally, we're here for vegetarianism because we care about the environment. Minimizing our consumption of meat and dairy is one way to do that; another is avoiding plastics where possible. You might be thinking "But I can just recycle my plastics!" and I am sorry to report that you would be wrong to think of this as a good solution. This NPR piece will wake you up to the truth in the most depressing way. 

I'm told that where I live, plastic that people put in their recycling bins sits in a warehouse waiting for some entity to want to purchase it to process it, and since there's almost no market for that--it doesn't usually make financial sense--it eventually gets incinerated like other trash. So when you're buying food and other items, pay attention to the packaging and avoid plastic where you can.