Zucchini fritters

I think we're gonna need a bigger frying pan.

The zucchini plants have taken over the garden. I cannot possibly keep up. Already, just three plants have produced dozens of zukes. And many more are on the way. If you are local, and enjoy the green things, you would be doing me a tremendous kindness by raiding my plot of earth and taking some of the things off my hands.

What, you thought I was kidding?

Anyhow, here's something to ponder as you're making your way to the garden. They're zucchini fritters that I've made a bunch of times, and usually they turn out pretty well.

You start by shredding some zukes with your instrument of choice.

Then toss the stuff into a colander and lightly salt it. There are four cups of shredded zucchini here, and I always use Kosher salt.

Put a plate on top of the zucchini and weight it down for a couple of hours. The idea here is to drain out most of the water that's in the zukes.

I don't just let the weighted plate do all the work. Several times while I'm waiting I will toss the zucchini by hand and then manually press down on the plate to remove as much moisture as possible.

To dry it out even further I go a couple rounds with paper towels.

After which, the four cups of zucchini winds up being around two-thirds of a cup, or less. (The liquid you see is about two cups, and it's not even all of what leeched out of the zukes.)

In a bowl you put the zucchini, an egg, a good dose of grated cheese (Pecorino here), maybe a tablespoon each of flour and breadcrumbs, and salt and pepper.

Mix it all up and you're ready to go.

It's important that the oil (olive oil here) is very hot before dropping the fritters into the pan. These were only put in about thirty seconds ago and you can see that they're ready to be turned.

This batch turned out pretty good, but fritters are the kind of thing that can go either way. My advice is to be patient, and practice.

We've got plenty of zukes to go around. Remember?