This recipe is part of the cooking curriculum for Cooking Italy, a cook along group that cooks mostly from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classical Cooking. It’s a group of friends and food bloggers who want to seriously learn how to cook regional Italian cooking. If you are interested in joining, this group, go to Cooking Italy, and email me.

A sunny summer day awakens the anticipation of an afternoon at the pool, and not just any pool, but an olympic size pool, surrounded by a hill of trees on all sides, making a sticky, hot day livable. It is possibly the one thing I most like about our community and we can walk there. It makes summer fun, even when we have humidity. But, lunch must be prepared first, and this pasta with zucchini sauce is perfect. It’s summery, fresh, and portable. And, if everyone doesn’t finish eating before pool time, it travels well. Sitting at an umbrella table, soaking wet, eating pasta marks one great summer day.  

I doubt that Marcella was thinking of Zucchini Sauce as a poolside recipe, but I’m glad she created it nonetheless. It’s so good that I’m almost compelled to say that butter is my new new olive oil. But,   Retro Rose (my mom) would fall to the floor and I’m not up for the drama. Oh, she ate a big bowl of this, but we don’t need to tell her how much butter danced through the pasta.

Her sister, my godmother and favorite Aunt Rita had an aversion to butter. As a child she took hold of a stick of butter, consumed it and got into trouble, which added up to a life time of asking “did you put butter in this?” And, we would always have to say, “no we promise, there is no butter.” 

I inherited my Aunt Rita’s chefware pots and pans, and I can safely state, the bottoms of her cookware never saw butter. Her aversion carried over into the “family” and we rarely saw butter on the table, or on a vegetable, but to put butter on pasta wasn’t just against her wishes...it was against the family cooking rules.

Between my aunt’s butter phobia and the mass market gluttonous presentations, I’ve been afraid of cooking with butter in Italian food. I have changed my mind. I feel like I might be discovering the next level of Italian cooking that will still be my own creative, modern style, but always pointing back to the classical and traditional Italian.  But, not in that put a pound of butter into everything the way food TV shows do to increase ratings, but that’s another story.

The Many Hats Zucchini Wears

My friend, the zucchini, has worn many hats this summer here at Spinach Tiger. The sweet side of the zucchini showed you chocolate zucchini cake which led to zucchini chocolate chip cookies, and the savory dishes included crispy fried zucchini squash blossoms and my own creation, zucchini garlic scape pesto. I urge you to accept all the zucchini your gardener friends are trying to hand off to you and make all of these recipes, and if you discover or create your own, please let me know.

This zucchini sauce pairs sweetly with homemade egg fettucini and can be a very proper first and most important course for dinner or Sunday lunch. But, it sure tastes extra good at the pool.

Serve a fresh corn-tomato salad and watermelon slices or sorbet and celebrate  the best of summer.

Recipe (adapted from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, page 167-68)

1 1/2 pounds zucchini, ends trimmed, cut into sticks 2 1/2”long by 1/4” thick

Salt

10-12 fresh basil leaves, washed, paper-towel dried, torn into pieces

1/2 cup all purpose flour

Vegetable oil for frying

3 garlic cloves, peeled

4 T butter

1/2 cup freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano, plus cheese for serving at table

1 pound pasta

Rinse zucchini in cold water, scrubbing off the dirt residue, trim ends cut into sticks. Toss with salt a few times.  Put in colander, salt and place over a bowl to collect the moisture for a minimum of two hours. There will be a surprising amount of liquid. Check often.

Pat dry with paper towels, rinse colander as you will use it again to shake zucchini, after dredging with flour.

Pour vegetable oil in frying pan up to at least 1/4” and fry the garlic. Once it browns, remove, add in zucchini and fry until golden brown.

Cook  and drain pasta. Toss with butter. Add zucchini basil, cheese, toss thoroughly.

Note: I used zephyr zucchini, a hybrid between green and yellow. I used a homemade fettucini in the main picture and fusilli for the version we took to the pool.

Cooking Italy:  You may visit my friends on the Cooking Italy blog roll to see how they did with this dessert.  Next week, we will be making  Arrosticini Abruzzesi -- Skewered Marinated Lamb TIdbits.

Other recipes you may enjoy:

Squash Blossoms                      Chocolate Zucchini Cake                 Lasagna Caprese

Key Words:    Zucchini, Cooking Italy, Marcella Hazan, Pasta, Italian, Basil

Spinach Tiger Entry  92 Angela Robert - Cooking Italy: Zucchini Sauce with Garlic and Basil

All original content (outside of adapted recipe) copyright © 2009 Angela Roberts, All Rights Reserved