I’ve always read that you can eat the flowers from squash and zucchini. In the past, our plants haven’t really been fruitful enough to have to prune away some of the flowers so that the remaining ones will grow larger. But this year, my seed experiment is bearing some great results.

If you’re going to pick the flowers, you’re supposed to do it at midday when they’re open to the sun. Cut them a couple of inches below the flower and then twist off and discard the remaining stem.

We decided to make a basic ricotta stuffing and dredge the flowers in a batter loosely based on a recipe from Epicurious.

Stuffing

• 8 oz whole-milk ricotta
• 1/3 cup grated parmesan
• 1/4 cup finely chopped oregano
• 1-2 egg yolks, depending on the size
• salt & pepper to taste

Batter

• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
• enough club soda or water to make a mayonnaise-like consistency

Prune the blossoms (we cut around twenty) and gently rinse them in cold, running water to remove the dirt and bugs. There were a lot of bugs.

While the flowers are drying on a towel, combine the stuffing ingredients. When the flowers are fairly dry, you very gently work the petals open, remove and discard the stamen, and stuff some cheese into the base of the flower with the tip of a butter knife. Don’t overstuff them or the cheese will run out during the frying process. There’s a pretty good video tutorial on this process here. You’ll probably have some stuffing left over, which is a good thing. I keep mine in the freezer for baked ziti and homemade ravioli.

Once all of the squash blossoms are stuffed, you heat a half-inch of oil (I used a combination of canola and sunflower oil) in a pan over medium-high heat. I like to use a small pan for this kind of frying. The relatively small amount of oil heats up faster between batches and it allows you to waste less oil overall.

This dredging mixture is not so different from the batter used in tempura and southern-fried catfish. You want it to be thick like mayonnaise or ranch salad dressing so it coats the blossoms well enough to encase them in crust. Dredge and fry five or six at a time. They only need about a minute on each side, so don’t walk away.

Drain the blossoms on a paper towel and serve with a red sauce or a pesto or both.

These tasted good. The cooking process was a little time-intensive, but no more than making eggplant parmesan or wiener schnitzel. It’s not a substantial meal, so most people serve it as an appetizer. We served these alongside some meatballs and it made a good dinner.

I’ve been going through my freezer and trying to use anything that’s getting old. I don’t have a lot of rules when it comes to cooking, but one of them is throw out anything that might be older than the cats. I remember during my freshman year of college, I pulled a jar of mayonnaise out of the fridge and it had completely separated back into egg and oil. Since then, I’ve never let anything lurk in the fridge for too long.

I made lasagna a couple of weeks ago. As usual, I had extra ground beef, ricotta, mozzarella, and sauce left over. I always mix it together and freeze the medley in a ziplock bag. That way, when I don’t really feel like cooking, I can just toss it with some ziti, add some jarred sauce, and I have an instant baked pasta. This time, I decided to use the mixture as filling for my ravioli.

The filling mixture can probably be replicated with one small container of ricotta cheese, a half cup of grated parmesan, a heaping tablespoon of chopped fresh parsley, a cup of shredded mozzarella, a cup of ground beef, a half cup of red sauce, and one egg yolk. As always, season to taste with salt and pepper.

The pasta dough is made with three eggs and between 2-2½ cups flour (instructions here). I rolled it very thin so that the dough wouldn’t be chewy. Next, I snipped off a corner of the ziplock so I could extrude the stuffing like frosting out of a pastry bag.

If I wanted to make large ravioli, I would have rolled out two sheets of dough and placed one on top of the other. But I like small ravioli, so I just folded the dough over like and long empanada and pressed out the air between the stuffing with my fingers. Next, I cut the dough into individual ravioli and sealed the edges with the back of a fork.

The stuffing looks small, but it spreads out inside the cavity during the cooking process. I let them dry on a well-floured baking sheet for a few hours and then boiled them in a large pot of salted water. I layered them in a pan with leftover sauce so they wouldn’t stick together.

These came out good. Next time, I’ll make this with another person. It would go a lot faster with one person rolling dough and the other person stuffing and cutting the ravioli. There are so many stuffing and sauce combinations. I can’t decide what to try next.