I was going to post something serious about the Gini coefficient but then I said, the hell with that. It's August. Let me post something seasonal and appropriate to people's lazy, frivolous mood. For example, something about a 3-kilo zucchini. And in fact the newspaper of Padova, where I used to live, ran a story of this 80-year-old retiree who cultivates his own little orto (vegetable garden) and came up with this monster zucchini, weighing about three kilos or over six and a half pounds. Unfortunately, the best zucchini are the smaller ones, but maybe the old geezer doesn't know this and let his zucchini get out of hand.
Italians usually call zucchini zucchine (feminine), which is a sort of diminutive of zucca (pumpkin), and in fact zucchini are part of the squash family, so that the Italians see zucchini as a sort of small pumpkin (except in a case like this, where it is close in size to a pumpkin). Isn't that interesting? But as I said, small zucchini are best, avoid the big ones.
All sorts of recipes with zucchini can be found on this blog by using the search function in the upper left corner.
