Okay, I'd started writing on another subject but I always love an excuse to write about my garden, especially when it involves food as well.

One of my favorite things to grow is winter squash. There are three main species that we grow in gardens, but the fruits are so different from one another that there may as well be a hundred or so. And if you get past the gang of garden pests bent on decimating your crop, there is a sort of instant gratification - when a squash flower gets pollinated, the squash launches into growth; I never cease to be amazed when I look at a canteloupe-sized fruit and remember that it was an over the size of a hazelnut only a week and a half earlier.

There are lots of well-behaved, compact summer squash, but with a few exceptions, if you want to grow winter squash you need to commit some space to them. The largest of the three I'm growing this year, a French heirloom called Rouge Vif d'Etampes (otherwise known as "Cinderella" but I refuse to call it that!), has pretty much encircled the garden with runners around eight meters long. A little less rambunctious is the odd, dark gray and warty Italian variety called Marina di Chioggia. I'm also growing a Japanese variety, also dark and warty, called Futsu. It's supposed to taste like hazelnuts; we'll see when the time comes. It's more diminutive than the others but its leaves are quite beautifully mottled in white and it could almost be used as an ornamental in its own right.

 

Whether you grow winter or summer squash, you also get an extra added benefit: Squash blossoms. Not only are they the most voluptuous flowers in the vegetable garden (with okra being a close second), they are also eminently edible. Just make sure you pick the male flowers only. The female flowers are fewer and farther between; they have a distinct swelling at the base and a three-lobed pistil inside. These will become a squash, but the male flowers last only a few hours each morning and as soon as their pollen has been spirited away by the bees, their function has come to an end. So you may as well use them. (If you accidently get a female one, maybe it will help prevent you from becoming one of the most dreaded personalities in any given neighborhood.You know who I'm talking about. The doorbell rings, you open the door and are greeted with the beaming manifestation of your neighbor, Mrs. Foister, pulling her kid's red wagon loaded with her latest pride and joy, a 56 pound pulpy green torpedo with your name on it.)

 

The easiest way to prepare squash blossoms is to make a thin batter of an egg, about half a cup of flour, a bit of baking powder, enough water to make a fairly thin batter, a dash of salt and a little oil. Cut off the stem, dip the flowers in the batter and fry them in a hot frying pan. If you want you can add a little cream cheese (but not too much!); some scallions mixed in are good too.

If you want to work a little harder, make stuffed squash blossoms - Kabak Çiçegi Dolmasi. It's not really that much work since there's not much prep work; all you have to do is shake the ants out, rinse it, cut the stem off and you're ready to go. If you don't get enough flowers in one day, you can collect them, put them in a bag and pop them in the fridge and combine them with the next day's haul.

 My filling (for around 40 flowers) consists of:

• 300 gr of minced meat (not ground meat if you can help it but if you do use ground, you'll be forgiven)
• about a cup of rice or a little more, 2 or 3 grated tomatoes (a great Turkish trick, the skin stays behind)
• one large onion, minced
• about 1/2 c minced parsley
• a few tablespoons of tomato paste
• a tablespoon of pepper paste (hard to find in the US but you can order it online - it's a Turkish ingredient you can't do without! Tukas is about the only commercial brand that's any good though.)
• 1 t cumin
• 2 t dried mint
• salt and pepper
• juice of half a lemon or a little more
• a dollop of olive oil
• some hot red flake pepper (pul biber, aleppo pepper) if you like

Knead the mixture well, then stuff it into the squash blossoms, being careful not to overfill them. Fold the petals over the stuffing, then pack them into the cooking pot with the petal end against the wall of the pot, then fill in the open space in the middle. If you use a large pot you'll get one layer, a smaller pot and you'll get two, but try and end up with either one or two complete layers. Pour a little more oil over the top, then mix a tablespoon of tomato paste with a cup of water and pour that over, then invert a plate over the top of the blossoms. Now add enough additional water to come up to the level of the plate, bring to a boil, turn the heat low and simmer, covered, for around 25 minutes. Let it stand for around 15 minutes before serving. In Turkey, meat dolma are nearly always served with yogurt. They make these in Greece as well, especially in the Eastern Aegean islands, though the filling tends to be a little plainer. There seems to be an odd "culinary law" in much of Greece that dictates that Thou Shalt Not Add Tomato And Lemon To The Same Dish. Thankfully, this law is unknown in Turkey, especially in the east Mediterranean and further east. In the east, they tend to use sumac instead of lemon for the souring agent for their dolma (not necessarily squash blossoms); the most common way is to soak a cup of sumac berried in hot water for a few hours ahead of time and add that to the cooking water. They also like to add isot, a toasted flake pepper from Urfa, to the filling. Amazing! Afiyet olsun and kali orexi too!