Too Much of a Good Thing
The Zucchini Showed Up and It Wouldn’t Stop
It started in July. One zucchini. Then two. Then five in a single week. By August the garden was producing zucchini faster than we could eat it, give it away, or think of things to do with it. I’d walk outside in the morning and there’d be another one the size of a baseball bat that wasn’t there yesterday.
This is the surplus problem. It doesn’t happen with expensive ingredients. It happens with the cheap, prolific, unstoppable ones — zucchini, tomatoes, kale, cucumbers, herbs — the things that grow faster than your recipe book can keep up.
Most people panic. They make zucchini bread. They make more zucchini bread. They leave bags of zucchini on their neighbor’s porch and pretend they don’t know who put it there.
But a surplus is actually the best thing that can happen to your cooking. Because when you have more of something than you can possibly waste, the fear of experimenting disappears completely.
The 48 Hours, the Sauce, the Freezer
I learned to think about a surplus in three stages, and the order matters.
First 48 hours: eat it raw. This is when the produce is freshest and the nutrients are highest. Shave the zucchini thin, dress it in lemon and olive oil, eat it as a salad. Slice the tomatoes, hit them with salt and basil, put them on the table. The minimum viable recipe. Three ingredients. No cooking. This is the food at its peak and it deserves to be eaten that way.
After that: change the state. If it’s a solid, make it a liquid. Blend the tomatoes into a sauce. Turn the herbs into pesto. Puree the zucchini into a soup. Roast the kale with olive oil and salt until it’s crispy. You’re extending the life by changing the form — the produce that would have gone soft in the fridge now has another week as a sauce in a jar.
Beyond that: archive it. This is where fermentation and freezing come in. Surplus cabbage becomes sauerkraut — salt, time, and the bacteria do the rest. Surplus cucumbers become pickles. Surplus tomatoes get slow-roasted at 250°F for four hours with garlic and oil until they shrink by 80 percent and concentrate into something so intensely flavored that a single tablespoon can carry an entire pot of soup.
Freeze the pesto in ice cube trays. Freeze the roasted tomatoes in jars. Freeze blended greens in trays and drop the cubes into smoothies in January. The surplus isn’t a problem. It’s the pantry you’re building for winter.
The Zucchini Specifically
Zucchini gets a bad reputation because it doesn’t taste like much on its own. It’s mild, watery, and neutral. People treat that as a flaw. It’s actually the point.
Because zucchini is neutral, it becomes whatever you need it to be. Shave it into ribbons and it’s pasta — it holds sauce, wraps around a fork, and functions exactly like pappardelle. Grate it into brownie batter and it disappears, leaving behind moisture and fiber that makes the texture fudgier than flour alone. Dice it small and stir it into rice and it stretches the dish while adding volume and nutrients without changing the flavor.
The zucchini is a shape-shifter. It doesn’t have a strong identity because it doesn’t need one. Its job is to take the form of whatever’s around it, and it does that job better than almost any other vegetable in the garden.
When the surplus hits, I stop trying to feature the zucchini and start using it as a building material. It goes into everything — soups, pastas, baked goods, grain bowls — and nobody notices it’s there. That’s not a failure. That’s the design.
The Slow-Roasted Tomato Move
If I could only keep one surplus technique, it would be this.
Take as many tomatoes as you have — any kind, any size, cut the big ones in half. Spread them on sheet pans with whole garlic cloves, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt. Roast at 250°F for about four hours.
They come out shrunken, dark, concentrated, and so intensely flavored they barely resemble the watery tomatoes that went in. Four pounds of fresh tomatoes becomes one jar of something that tastes like tomato paste and sundried tomatoes had a richer, more complex cousin.
That jar lasts weeks in the fridge. A spoonful stirred into pasta. A few spooned onto toast with ricotta. Blended into soup as the base. It’s the most efficient conversion of surplus I’ve found — you go from “I can’t eat another tomato” to “I have the best ingredient in my fridge” in one afternoon.
The Part That Isn’t About Food
The best thing about a surplus is what it does to your mindset.
When ingredients are scarce or expensive, you cook defensively. You follow recipes exactly. You measure. You don’t experiment because the cost of failure is real.
When you have twenty pounds of tomatoes, the cost of failure is zero. You can try anything. Slow-roast a batch. Ferment another. Try a cold soup you’ve never made. Give some away and trade with a neighbor who has too many peppers.
A surplus is permission to play. It’s the only time most of us are brave enough to stop following the recipe and start improvising.
The garden isn’t screaming at you. It’s handing you a laboratory.
Follow the remix → @remixology