Vegetable Patch: Lita, Goya, Magda Cousa, or, Can This Marriage Be Saved?

If my husband and I ever get divorced, it will be on the grounds of incompatible vegetables.  He likes what he calls “aristocratic” vegetables like artichokes and asparagus, while I tend toward eggplant and the humble zucchini (essentials in all that Mediterranean food I love to cook and eat).  I’m happy to eat artichokes and asparagus, but he’s not so happy to do the eggplant and zucchini.  Luckily, there are a few other vegetables we’ll both eat, like broccoli and string beans, and fortunately he seems to like my seemingly endless variations on onion-and-tomato based sauces.  Still, I feel a bit deprived of my beloved zucchini and would love to find a way to bring it back into our diet.

So off I went, via car and the interwebs, to see what options there might be.  First thing I discovered, which shouldn’t have been a surprise:  there’s more than one kind of zucchini.  One is a cheerful bright orangey-yellow—I’m not talking about what we usually call “summer squash” with the slightly crooked neck—these are straight and look just like zucchini, except, well, they’re bright yellow.  There’s another kind that’s a lighter green and is sweeter than the familiar dark green zucchini.  This one seems to go by a number of names; when I went to the farmer’s market, one booth called it “lita (not sure if that’s LEE-ta or LY-ta) squash” and another called it “Goya squash.”  Alas, the interwebs failed to resolve the question of what the difference might be, if there is one, and in fact there was very little information about them anywhere—until I found a site that indicated that lita squash was also known as Middle Eastern squash.  Which is also known as magda cousa, kusa, vegetable marrow, Bianco di Trieste and quite a few other names (check out the photos on that last site too).  I suspect it’s probably relatively new to the American market, having been a staple in the countries of the Mediterranean for a long time.

While we’re on the topic of names, “summer squash” is the squash you harvest in the summer (duh!), when it’s smaller, and could apply to green zucchini and the small yellow crook- or straight-necked varieties, or magda cousa/lita/goya/etc.  Personally I prefer smaller zucchini to the giant baseball bats that they turn into, especially in August and September (the “season of aggressive zucchini-giving” according to an old New Yorker cartoon, which, alas, I have been unable to locate).  Though I gather from those who grow it in their home gardens that seemingly one day it’s a flower, the next day it’s a vegetable and the day after that it’s a monster threatening to take over your house.

Since zucchini has been off my shopping list for a long time, I’m sorry to say there’s not much in my personal recipe collection at the moment.  These zucchini chips from Cooking Light, sound very tasty and might actually be acceptable to you-know-who.

And here's a collection of twenty recipes which all sound delicious, and will be particularly useful if you’re anticipating an overabundance of zucchini in the next two months.  (If you click on that last website, you’ll see that National Sneak-Some-Zucchini-Onto-Your-Neighbor’s-Porch Day is coming right up on August 8.)

So, back to the incompatible vegetables problem.  I obtained some yellow zucchini and some lita/goya/magda cousa and tried them out at dinner one night.  I steamed them slightly, to make it a fair comparison, and asked my husband to try just a piece of each.  He looked very hesitant, and maybe even a little scared, but agreed and took a couple of tentative bites.  He said they were “not bad” and that he’d even be willing to eat them on occasion.  Actually, I think he knew that his judgment would find its way into this blog post and didn’t want to look bad in the eyes of my worldwide readership.  So, I guess our marriage won’t immediately succumb to the incompatible vegetables problem…and now, how will I ever get him to eat eggplant?