Last week’s CSA brought us cantaloupe, 3 beets, 6 ears of corn, 2 pounds tomatoes, a single large eggplant, peaches, zucchini, and nectarines, as well as the usual eggs and bread (Great Harvest challah).

We’ve already made pretty good progress; the cantaloupe was ripe and perfect, so K and I ate it up within the first couple of days. The peaches and nectarines disappeared similarly quickly (Maryland summer peaches are absolutely wonderful). I made the Lee Bros. Creamed Corn recipe* with the corn, and K made two stir fry dishes: one with shrimp and tomato, and another with ground beef and cubed eggplant. Fantastic dishes, both.

* Note on the Lee Bros recipe: if you try it, go easy on the salt. I think the Diamond brand of kosher salt they have down south is less strong than the Morton’s we have up here. I salted to taste and used barely half of what they did.

This past weekend was notable for two things: 1) K cooked an entire ham on the grill, and it was amazing (went well with the creamed corn, too); 2) I used up four pounds of zucchini.

See, we had a giant zucchini sitting in the fridge; a friend of ours picked it from his garden. Apparently zucchini gets really big if you don’t pick it in time…

I don’t know if you can tell, but that giant zucchini weighed 2 lb, 11 oz and change. In contrast, the normal zucchini next to it weighed in at 6 oz. I decided to slice them both into thin rounds for gratin. Thank goodness for the V-slicer.

Hilariously, the giant zucchini filled up two 7×11 baking dishes of gratin all by itself. Good thing we had a lot of potatoes for alternating layers.

Then I V-sliced the four smaller zucchini into rounds, and made two more gratins in 9-inch pie pans.

Over four pounds of zucchini used up successfully!

(For the curious, the gratin recipe I used was very loosely based on this one.)