Salsa Verde is the new Buttermilk!

There's an elementary school in my neighborhood that maintains a little vegetable garden. Last summer, massive amounts of squash grew, the vines grew through the fence onto the sidewalk, and along the arms of those vines grew their best fruit (in my opinion), the blossom. At that time I had never cooked squash blossoms before and they're such spiky little flowers I was never prepared to pick them anyway. And THEN I conquered the first part ....

Well now ... they're back! And I'm prepared. And they are beginning to bud along the sidewalk again. So I picked one. IT'S PUBLIC PROPERTY!

I wanted them to have a heavy batter since I only had the one and it was lunch but I didn't have an egg and I didn't want to use milk. So I used salsa verde. I know - it was adventurous but that's the whole point, right? I cleaned out the stamen, stuffed the body with some white cheese, dipped into the flour, then the salsa, and then the flour again. Now instead of deep frying, I poured a little vegetable oil in my cast iron skillet and I held it up at an angle so the oil could form a puddle. I held it in that position with the stuffed blossom in the oil, and flipped it when one side browned. This took MAYBE a total of 45 seconds.

And .... it was delicious.

Infused Oil

I know. I hate that word too. "Infused". It's so 2006. Everything is infused these days, isn't it? Well ... for lack of a better term ... I have some infused oil to share. After deep frying my squash blossoms and letting the oil cool, I drained it through a mesh sieve to save for near-future use. To my surprise, the smell that emanated from the oil was of the squash blossoms and it smelled so good! So I did what my mom does and dropped a twig of rosemary and a clove of garlic in. *Make sure the garlic is cooked first. When raw garlic molds the bacteria can cause botulism!

Make sure anything you put in the oil is actually submerged. Anything above will start to mold and ruin everything. Definitely using this oil on tonight's roasted potatoes.

Awesome Blossom

Finally I serendipitously found zucchini blossoms for sale at the Farmer's Market. In tradition with Farmer's Market Sunday's, I bought a batch prepared to set out on the arduous task known as stuffed and fried zucchini blossoms! And, while time consuming, it was easier than I thought.

All you have to do is check the inside of the flower, remove the stamen (yellow polleny looking thing), and make sure there aren't any bugs.

I then combined ricotta, salt, pepper, and red chili flakes, stuffed it into a ziploc bag, cut off the end, and piped it into the flower. Just pipe enough to fill the flower. Obviously if it's oozing out then your fry time is going to be a mess.

The batter was a simple light batter. I just mixed flour and beer. I didn't measure anything - I just made it the consistency of a semi-runny pancake batter then dipped the blossoms in that batter only. No pre-dredging.

I put about 3 inches of oil into a wok and heated it up. I think if you own a deep fryer (which I never ever will in my lifetime) you're supposed to check the temp for like 350 degrees but that isn't so easy to do with a wok and a meat thermometer. To really check the temp of your oil, put the end of a chopstick in. Because they're made of bamboo and therefore naturally contain water, if your oil is hot enough then little bubbles will rapidly escape the chopstick and fry in the oil. Otherwise I have no tips for deep frying.

Because of the really light coating of batter, they were crisp and fried but mostly the blossom and filling was left instead of breading. I topped it with course salt and that was it. I can finally add a notch to the belt of obstacle I so desperately wanted to hurdle.