Today was a good day at the Heart and Spoon.
I tend to gauge the quality of our days by whether or not we have dinner. Food is our primary communal achievement, aside from sporadic home repair.
I’m not a particularly food oriented person, but I’m a family-oriented person. Food brings people together so… in that sense, I’ve become quite dinner focused.
Today Kiki and I made baked chicken, corn on the cob, and we stuffed this gigantic thing that we originally thought was a zucchini but we later realized must be a hybrid of zucchini and winter squash. Whatever it was, it was the size and density of a troll club.
People used to bring home squash of this sort on a regular basis. They would find them in free piles on the side of the road and then dump them on the kitchen counter with a real sense of pride… like they were bringin’ home some serious bacon.
Ironically, the contributors of these squash monstrosities never harbored any sense of responsibility beyond the unloading of the gigantic lub. Someone else would have to spend hours grating the thing and baking it into bread… or cubing it, blanching it and freezing it.
Eventually we made a rule: No one is allowed to bring home strange or excessive food unless they are prepared to process it themselves.
This put an end to the troll-club zucchini for a while. I don’t know who strolled along with the one we ate this evening. It sat on the living room couch, abandoned, for three days before anyone even took the initiative to transport it to the kitchen.
We cut it in half, long ways, and stuffed one side of it with rice, beans, tomatoes from our garden, spices and cheese. We grated the other half and Lali made chocolate, cayenne, zucchini bread.
We ate our bean-stuffed hybred by candlelight and it was delicious.
We don’t generally eat by candlelight. Ash may have thought it was a birthday cake. He had two helpings.
I guess one troll-club zucchini a year is allowed. It took three of us to turn it into food and seven of us to eat it. It definitely brought us all together.