Wha…?
You’re still here?
Even with that title?
And you honestly want to read whatever goes with a title like that?
(Weirdos.)
Man, what it is going to take to get rid of you people? Something extremely wrong and possibly illegal, it seems.
(Sickos.)
Nevertheless, as long as you’re here…
That's a quarter...for context.
To be perfectly honest, I was going to call this post “The fine art of growing inedible vegetables,” but then I did a little research and learned that the alternative title was entirely appropriate in an inappropriate way.
So I decided to go with it instead.
There were, of course, the standard word choice dilemmas: Do I call the ovaries behemoth or monstrous or maybe just honking…but colossal spoke to me in a Colonel Sanders meets Coliseum kind of way.
Batter up!
So what the hell are you reading about, anyway?
As it turns out, nothing all that exciting.
Basically – as you probably know (unless you’re Jose) – I was gone for a couple weeks. And in that time, my garden produced not one, not two, but three sperm whales.
Okay, not whales so much as baseball bats.
Okay, not baseball bats so much as ridiculously oversized zucchini.
Which – by the way – I believe they call ‘courgettes’ in Great Britain (or else this oddball British guy in a hostel somewhere in Europe was screwing with me that he didn’t know what a ‘zucchini’ was just to seem interesting or compelling in an annoying way or whatever bad ideas go through the head of odd guys from Britain. Perhaps someone out there can illuminate???)
Twins. Twice the work. Twice the joy.
Anyway, in the interest of stretching this minor and only mildly entertaining incident into an entire blog, I looked up zucchinis on Wikipedia (I would think – and hope – by now you guys realize that my purpose in life was to wait around for the internet to be created, [Thanks, Al Gore!!!] and then look stupid stuff up. It’s not much of a calling, but it’s what I’ve got.)
So during the course of my always-compelling research, I learned some alarming and freaky facts that have caused me to relocate the offending vegetable body parts onto the back deck.
Read and learn:
“In a culinary context, zucchini is treated as a vegetable. Botanically, however, the zucchini is an immature fruit, being the swollen ovary of the female zucchini flower.”
Ummm….what!? Gross! (That fact right there was enough to compel me to take the monsters outside. I don’t need no competition from any other ovaries in my own home…)
“Zucchini, like all summer squash, has its ancestry in the Americas. While most summer squash were introduced to Europe during the time of European colonization of the Americas, zucchini is Italian in origin. It was the result of spontaneously occurring mutations (also called “sports”).”
Nice how the Italians call mutations “sports”. Do they also call freaks “funs” and monsters “entertainments”?
Way to be misleading, Italy.
“Mature zucchini can be as much as three feet long, but are often fibrous and not appetizing to eat.”
Tell me about it.
“Zucchini with the flowers attached are a sign of a truly fresh and immature fruit, and are especially sought by many people.”
What people? People, if you’re out there, can you call me? I can get you what you’re looking for. They ain’t cheap, but it’s worth it. Right???
“In 2005, a poll of 2,000 people revealed the zucchini (courgette???) to be the Britain’s 10th favorite culinary vegetable.”
Woo hoo!
Tenth place!
Let’s see…gold, silver, bronze… So tenth place is what? Aluminum? Tin? Cardboard?
That is a fact so boring and worthless, it is barely worth repeating. In fact, I urge you not to repeat it, lest you drive off an otherwise interested potential mate.
“One good way to control over-abundance is to harvest the flowers, which are an expensive delicacy in markets because of the difficulty in storing and transporting them.”
Again, would someone looking for this expensive zucchini crap please contact me? I can set you up…for a price.