Ingredients
3 zucchini (about 1.5 pounds)
1 onion
1 lemon
3 oz crumbled feta
2 tbsp yogurt
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 bunch mint, coarsely chopped
your staples: red pepper flakes, salt, pepper, olive oil
Process
Heat oven to 450 degrees. Slice zucchini at a bias into 1/2 inch thick slices. Cut half the onion into 1/2 inch thick slices. Quarter the lemon into wedges.
Squeeze lemon into a small bowl, reserving the rinds. Coarsely grate (or finely chop) the remaining half of the onion and the garlic and add to the bowl with the lemon juice.
Transfer the zucchini, the sliced onions, and the lemon rinds to a baking sheet. Season with salt and pepper. Drizzle with olive oil. Roast for 20 minutes or until the zucchini begins to brown and the lemons begin to caramelize.
Finely chop the caramelized lemon rinds and add to the bowl of lemon juice and onion. Also add the feta cheese, yogurt, and red pepper flakes to the bowl. Stir to combine. Season with salt and pepper.
Serve the roasted zucchini and onions with feta dressing drizzled on top. Garnish with fresh mint.
I made this recipe last night, while I was riffing off an Ali Slagle recipe that was itself a riff of an Ottolenghi recipe. I simply love the intense caramel bitterness of roasted lemons, which are not featured in recipes nearly as often as they should be. To think of all the lemon rinds I had composted instead of roasting into chewy golden wedges that taste like the platonic ideal of Citrus! The roasting brings out some wonderfully unique bass notes of citrus, which we don’t see very often when lemons are squeezed over dishes, where the juice plays a role of accenting a dish with light, acidic top notes.
After plating my dinner, I was reminded of my parents, who have recently swapped out red meat for chicken or, more frequently, a zucchini substitute. This is quite a dramatic reinvention for them: I had never seen a zucchini served in their house when I was growing up. Instead, I remember lots of pork chops and potatoes-as-the-vegetable dishes (which were paired with thick-cut buttered garlic toast as the starch dish). My parents have spent the past few months in and out of doctor’s offices for a medley of heart conditions, liver problems. These were unexpected. I had spent all year bracing myself for respiratory issues and Covid, but as is usually the case, my worries were misplaced and misguided. Last night, I sent my mom the picture included in this letter, told her I was thinking of her and her own attempts at chicken-and-zucchini.
I’ve spent the past few months holed up in my apartment fielding emails from anxious undergrads in Berkeley looking for advice on getting an A and fielding calls from my parents in Arizona looking for advice for reducing blood pressure and on how to prepare squash. I’ve been joining Zoom calls to receive dispatches on the asymptotics of robust estimators and joining family FaceTimes for dispatches on how loud the beeping of a defibrillator vest is when it detects signs of heart failure, and what exactly one should rush to do in these circumstances. I’ve been grading papers and taking my own exams, holding seances to summon the answers from my subconscious, from the ether. In April I had a video call where I watched my mom blow out the candles on a German chocolate cake my sister had made for her birthday, where the weight of the accumulating years began to feel ominous. I’ve had many job interviews after which, exhausted, I would take a long walk in Golden Gate Park and think of getting a remote job and moving back to Arizona in order to be closer to my family, to have my mother’s birthdays in person, to feel the heat and flicker of every last candle on the cake.
I wake up and wonder why I’m feeling burnt out. I make coffee and respond to students’ emails and check my mother’s iPhone location to see whether she was feeling well enough this morning to make it to work. Living in California, I’ve been subsisting on these stolen secondhand signs and clues as to the situation back home. I understand my family does not want to worry me with partial, incomplete information from the doctors, or from speculations mainly fueled from WebMD, but I worry anyway. There is nothing else to do. There have been too many secret doctor’s visits and tense family discussions that never made it this far west on the family FaceTime circuit; I wonder and worry about what other omens in my family got dropped somewhere in the deserts of the Sonora or the Mojave before making it to me.
I no longer live in those particular deserts, the ones where I spent my first 22 years. I moved further north, where it rains some years and the only deserts are metaphysical. I think about what I want to cook tonight, and what I wish I could cook with my parents, and about what I wish my parents had cooked for us all those years.