i stole again

I again went out onto Sampsonia Way and picked zucchini flowers from the plant growing in my neighbor’s alley flower-bed.

The last time I made the pittuli, I added no additional salt thinking that what was in the cheese would be enough. It wasn’t. This time I added a bit too much. (I have an excuse to make another batch.) I also separated the zucchini flower from its base and made the batter more liquidy; both alterations made it easier to fold the flowers into the batter. The only change from my mother’s recipe is that I add parsley. (In the image on the left, the black specks are parsley.) I take my mother’s frozen parsley and shave it into the batter. My mother gives me the parsley frozen in a tube-shape wrapped in cellophane. BTW, the frozen parsley looks like a bag of weed.

This is an eat-standing meal, because I eat the fritters as soon as they come out of the pan. Yes, they are very hot and you have to delicately rip them into small steaming chunks or risk burning your mouth. In the Zinga family, there are two foods – zucchini pittuli and fried potato wedges – that you eat out of the frying pan or immediately after you take the item out. I love eating the crispy fritters hot out of the frying pan; my dad loves eating the potato wedges as they brown.

The black prongs and the coin-shaped gas-burner lid add interesting elements to the image. Also, I like the rigid circles of the frying pan and the coin shaped gas-lid as well as the amorphous circular shapes of the pittuli.