Zucchini flowers

Last year, I posted about getting the first Zucchini of the season on July 11th. Here is a link to that post. This year, I'm expecting the first one next week! While Zucchini is one of my all time favorite veggies, especially to grill, there is another use for the zucchini plant.

The flowers are edible. You want to eat the male flowers and leave the female flowers as the females become the Zucchini fruit. To tell the males from the females, look at the stem of the flower. From the picture above, you can barely make out the stem of the closed flower in the upper left hand corner. It is male because the stem is very thin. The flower in the lower left hand corner is female because it has a thicker stem. This thicker stem will become a full grown Zucchini in a few days.

There are many ways to prepare Zucchini flowers, or Squash blossoms. You can tear them up and toss them in a salad. Or, you can stuff them with chopped veggies, rice and cheese, dip them in flour and fry them in oil as I descriped in the post about Squash blossoms last year. Another method is to lightly sautee them in oil and serve them with your salad. Probably the best known way to serve Squash blossoms is to stuff them with veggies or cheese and dip the flower in a thin pancake batter and fry them. Though this is the most popular method of preparation, it is also my least favorite as it crushes the subtlety of the flower.

However you decide to prepare your Squash flowers, the good news is that you will have lots of them. Male flowers outnumber female flowers on a Zucchini plant by a ratio of ten to one or more!