Come Saturday Morning

I'm back from a few perfect days with friends in Pennsylvania (more of that anon, when I sort through my photos of the Solebury/New Hope area and write my review of the wonderful new Terrence McNally play we saw at the Bucks County Playhouse), and now home with my cats.  I will not write about my fury as I drove back to New York.  There is not now nor will there ever be any excuse for it to take an hour to go from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to my part of Queens.  A full hour.  Even the approach to the Bridge wasn’t as bad this time was as the BQE.

Enough of that.  I had my usual grumpy musings about the uselessness of vacations away that were obliterated by returning here.  But this morning, as I sat out back with my coffee before it gets too hot, I saw this:

Those, my friends, are zucchini blossoms.  It's a short-lived flower, and one must be paying attention to the garden (and you all know I'm a benevolently negligent gardener) to see it, let alone eat it.

I pulled out my best cookbook, Marcella Hazan’s The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, and looked up the simple recipe. 

It's a boy!

 Pastella for dipping...

oil for frying (very quick frying)....  

Et voilà! Naturally, I made a large mess in a very short time, but none of that mattered.

 

What a lovely breakfast, fresh from my garden!  It’s the only time I’ll have this for breakfast, but how sweet that it wasn’t a Monday when I wouldn’t have had time to sit out back with my coffee, let alone cook them up. 

All this and the hydrangea are blooming too.

~ Molly Matera, signing off of electronic communications devices to read a real book.