Skinny

WARNING ZUCCHINI LOVERS: If you have a special place in your heart for zucchini, please forgive me; my intent is not to offend, just to share my thoughts about this…vegetable. It also isn’t my intent to give you the impression that I, Brad, am a picky eater, I am not, and never plan to be. I am just here to state the facts. This is my warning, read on and have an open mind to what I have to say. Thank you.

Zucchini, or as my fast talking next-door neighbor likes to call it “skinny,” is an odd vegetable. The zucchini is a type of squash that closely resembles a cucumber, and belongs to the family “Cucurbitaceae.” And no, I cannot pronounce that word without spitting all over my screen. Zucchini would be my favorite vegetable, except there’s just one tiny little detail that I just cannot overlook …THEY DON’T TASTE LIKE ANYTHING! Why do people plant them? I do not understand this type of logic. “Let’s plant something so we can eat it, but wait, here’s the zinger…it won’t taste like anything.” It’s one of those things where people will get all excited about growing zucchini, but then when they’re right for eating, people will give these sixty pound monsters, away to everyone like they’re the Black Plague. Every once in a while in the fall, I’ll see Jehovah’s Witnesses walking in pairs down the street with armfuls of zucchini and a befuddled look on their faces. It doesn’t stop there. I’ll be invited to someone’s house and find zucchini everywhere; in the magazine rack in the bathroom, in the pet’s food dish, in the stuffed animal display in the kid’s bedroom, and very rarely, but it happens, sitting on top of the grand piano in a seductive fashion, right in between the candelabras.

If people fail in pawning off their plethora of zucchini on unsuspecting family members and neighbors, they’ll hide it in different kinds of food. You’ll never hear anyone complaining about food with zucchini in it tasting bad…BECAUSE THEY CAN’T TASTE THE ZUCCHINI! If zucchini has a special gift, it is cloaking itself into foods that don’t actually need help in tasting good. Growing up, I would find zucchini in all sorts of food, like cakes, muffins, burgers, fudge, perogies, and even in the punch at family gatherings. I’ve had zucchini casserole, where I didn’t even taste the zucchini…and it was the main ingredient. What’s the point of it even being there? Hiding zucchini in food is like having one of the band members of Slipknot playing the recorder…you’re never going to hear it, but it’s there…and it doesn’t fit.

The only use I can find for zucchini is if someone made a Kleenex box out of one… or if it looked like a gun. Men have the talent of making anything into a gun, and yes I, Brad, have wielded a zucchini like a sawed-off shotgun. And yes, I saved the day from, savage, wild-eyed, invisible aliens; actually they were only here for jars of pickled carrots from the farmers market, but I didn’t know that at the time…don’t look at me like that!

Sincerely, Yet Still Utterly Confused About Zucchini - Brad