The trouble with late summer’s bounty of zucchini isn’t in the volume of the vegetable itself. Rather, it is in the lack of creative recipes for using it.

Because frankly, what the world most certainly does not need are more recipes for zucchini muffins and breads and casseroles. The website AllRecipes.com, for example, lists 244 recipes for zucchini bread alone. In fact, there are so many that users of the site have stopped even trying to come up with creative names for the recipes, instead resorting to Roman numerals. A slice of Zucchini Bread VI, anyone?

So it has been a long time since I have been impressed by a zucchini recipe. Using a vegetable peeler to turn it into ribbons for a salad is benign. Shredding it into strands for “pasta” is creative, if not particularly delicious. And I have no interest in yet another variant of stuffing and baking them, no matter how much bacon, sausage and cheese you jam in there.