When Charlie Gailunas harvests zucchini from his lush Catonsville garden, he might overlook a specimen camouflaged beneath a canopy of leaves. "Sometimes you miss one," he says.
By the time he finally discovers the hidden squash, it may have grown to baseball-bat proportions, far beyond the zucchini's capacity for tenderness and a pleasing, mild taste.
Gailunas, a retired hospital administrator who has cultivated his 700-square-foot garden for 30 years, doesn't toss the zucchini, nor does he pawn it off. He makes Gagutz, a Sicilian soup introduced to him by a neighbor's mother who lived in Little Italy.
"She was a fount of Old World information," Gailunas says.
There are summers when a subsidy paid to home gardeners not to grow zucchini may seem like a great idea to weary recipients of rampant garden gifting. Not this summer. Rising food costs have rekindled appreciation for the backyard abundance that helped Gailunas, 68, and his wife feed six children.
Zucchini is an exemplary addition to the contemporary Victory Garden. The prolific summer squash grows quickly and is high in vitamins C and E, as well as antioxidants and minerals. At its unadorned best when picked at 6 to 8 inches long, zucchini, small and large, also lends itself to countless preparations, from fritters to relish to muffins.
Along with melons and cucumbers, zucchini belongs to the cucurbita family and is technically a fruit. Only female squash flowers set fruit, leaving all of those male flowers for a feast of lightly battered fried blossoms.
The zucchini shares its ancient origins in the Americas with all squash varieties. European explorers introduced zukes to Italian gardens, where they were further developed and became a culinary staple throughout the continent. Today, seed catalogs abound with zucchini varieties, including hybrids as round as a bowling ball, ridged to better hold dip, and nearly black in color.
When she moved to Parkville last year, Meghan Murphy, 29, tilled a patch of earth wrapped around a corner of her new home for the garden she never imagined she would crave. Growing up in Mayfield, Murphy had watched her mother tend a beautiful spread, but her own inner gardener didn't sprout until adulthood.
Now an avid cook who chronicles her creations on her blog at culinarynovice.blogspot.com, Murphy, the granddaughter of a greengrocer, delights in her small garden, including two productive zucchini plants.
