An Ode To Squash

I love fresh yellow summer squash.  I fixed some up the other day, just like Mama used to make.  Not all healthy and crisp-tender (whatever THAT means), but good and southern. 

It's best fresh from the garden with the stem still sappy and wet.  Chopped all up and fried in a cast iron skillet with onions and lots of artery-clogging bacon.  Yum.  Cooked for a good hour so that every ounce of nutritional value has been leached out and wafts about the kitchen in the form of squashy steam.  I can eat it by the heaping bowl-full.

Even as a child I loved this divine yellow vegetable.  Mama boasted that I would rather have a big bowl of fried squash than a bowl of ice cream!  No problem with her child eating her veggies.  My uncle and I would have contests to see who could eat the most bowls full, both of us sitting with knees up to our chests, bowls precariously balanced.  And there was always an abundance flowing from my grandfather's garden where he grew them the size of large eggplants, not the wimpy little fragile things I was forced to purchase at Wal-mart.


But I ate my bowl of squash alone.  Not fresh from the garden, but definitely fried to the right mushiness.  But just for old times sake, I pulled up my kness to balance my bowl.