When Life Gives You Zucchini, Make Pineapple!

The Stealth Gardening article last month addressed the idea of hiding your vegetable garden in plain sight—blending flowers in with vegetables to make an attractive edible landscape.  There is a phenomenal amount of work to be done the first year in any area being turned to vegetable production, and especially in an area that is primarily rocks and sand.  It also takes a little while for shrubs to grow, so there was a lot of brown space to fill in.  Enter the squash plants.  Anyone who has ever grown zucchini can testify to how quickly the plants can overtake a garden.  Like something out of a 1960s Japanese horror movie.

Anyway, I needed a lot of green to fill in the bare areas and look attractive.  So I planted a lot of squash and melons.  In addition to the pumpkins, butternuts, cucumbers, watermelons, and honeydew, I apparently planted a lot of zucchini and yellow summer squash.  My rough count Saturday came up with a total of 22.  (Please, hold the laughter.) 

(Not sure that was the wisest idea.  And I would like to note that I didn’t start out with the idea of 22 zucchini plants.  I probably started with only eight.  But, you know, the seed packet says to put 3-4 seeds in a hill.  And so I dutifully followed directions.  I mean, some of the seeds were older, and I was gardening in a brand new area.  I wasn’t sure what the germination rate would be.  So cut me a little slack.) 

And then just about every seed sprouted.  And I couldn’t just thin them out and kill the baby plants.  (I don’t know why—it’s not like I would have been killing kittens.  Sigh.)  So the excess plants got transplanted all over the yard.  And they’re filling in nicely.  But you know they’re giving me a lot of zucchini.  I had several good recipes using zucchini, a few of which I’ve posted here.  Now I had to ramp things up a bit.

So I was thumbing through The USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning and stumbled across a recipe that piqued my interest:  zucchini pineapple.  Now that is something I would totally ignore in normal times.  I love pineapple.  Do not mess with my pineapple. 

In case you hadn’t noticed, these are not normal times. 

I posted an article two weeks ago about substitutes and learning what will work for our families.  So I figured I’d give this zucchini-pineapple a try.  I admit to being highly skeptical.

Zucchini-Pineapple

4 quarts cubed or shredded zucchini

1 can (46 ounces) unsweetened pineapple juice

1 ½ cups bottled lemon juice

3 cups sugar

Peel zucchini and either cut into ½-inch cubes or shred.  Mix zucchini with other ingredients in a large pan and bring to a boil.  Simmer 20 minutes.  Fill jars with hot mixture and cooking liquid, leaving ½ inch headspace.  Adjust lids and process in a boiling water bath. 

For half-pints and pints, process 15 minutes at altitudes under 1000 feet; 20 minutes at altitudes 1000-6000 feet, and 25 minutes at altitudes about 6000 feet.  Yield: 8-9 pints.

Before getting to the family reviews, here are a few tips and observations.  First, this recipe is much easier than canning real pineapple.  And cheaper, because you don’t have to buy the pineapple, just the pineapple and lemon juices, both of which are shelf-stable.  When peeling the zucchini, do not leave any green.  The green is a little off-putting when pineapple is supposed to be yellow and it raises the little antennae on the kids’ radar of suspicious foods.  Second, I would use yellow summer squash (the kind that look like zucchini, but yellow) if it’s an option.  The more yellow color, the better.  Next, the lemon juice (at least what I used—freshly opened bottle and not out of date) is a bit cloudy.  The zucchini-pineapple doesn’t have the clear, clean appearance of home canned pineapple.  Also, I measured exactly and got only 6 ½ pints of zucchini pineapple on my first batch. 

Family reviews:  Note that I have three recipes I regularly use that call for canned pineapple—strawberry Jell-O salad, Hawaiian haystacks, and Chinese chicken salad.  For the first foray into using zucchini-pineapple and trying to get it past the kids, I opted for the Jell-O salad.  Unfortunately, while it is definitely easier to hide a suspicious food in a recipe where it will get all mixed in with other ingredients, this Jell-O salad is generally only made for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and picnics involving the extended family.  Making this salad for just a regular day already got the kids suspicious. 

KOTPE and Ellie both noticed a little extra green on the “pineapple”.  Aaron and Blueberry Girl said nothing.  I suspect it got past my husband because he didn’t have his reading glasses on, and Blueberry Girl is just generally polite about dinner and recognizes what a boatload of work it is.  She is grateful to have someone else cooking for her.  Buttercup didn’t notice a thing and said it tasted great.  KOTPE summed up his review like this:  “If you put this in the Jell-O salad for holidays during normal times, I would be sad.  But if you used it during difficult times to make holidays normal, I would be really happy.”

So there you have it.  As a substitute, I would probably give zucchini-pineapple a “B”.  Media crema and vinegar for sour cream gets an A-.  Yogurt for sour cream gets an A most of the time (but not on baked potatoes).  Aquafaba for eggs gets an A (A+ for making chocolate mousse).  It’s nothing like that stupid banana peel fakin bacon that vegans rave about or ridiculous homemade fritos, both of which get Fs. 

If you’ve got an excess of zucchini and canning jars and lids to spare, you might give this recipe a try.  It’ll let you have a little tropical flair when we can no longer get fresh pineapples from overseas.

Note:  For those of you who have freeze-dryers, the freeze-dried pineapple-zucchini shreds are fabulous.

Links to related posts:

Incredible, Edible Zucchini

Sour Cream Substitute from Media Crema

Yogurt

Aquafaba

Fakin Bacon

Homemade Fritos

Stealth Gardening

The USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning

 12 august 2023