Thursday, July 11 Zucchini Cakes with Remoulade, Grilled Corn, Sliced Tomato, Blackened Tofu Rating: 4.25

One of the things that makes summer in the South special is the vegetables  - corn, tomatoes, zucchini all abound for months and it’s enough to make you wonder how anyone could say they don’t like veggies. Yes, I know, technically corn is a grain, but still. Our CSA has been loading us up with zucchini and heirloom tomatoes (score!), so we’ve been in vegan heaven lately. My very first vegan cookbook was The Vegan Table, and the zucchini cakes recipe was one of the first ones I tried. I still love it, years later. I was intrigued by the idea of vegan crab cakes, even though I don’t recall having eaten an actual crab cake in my life. Despite growing up on an island, I never liked the taste of the flesh of most marine life. Anyway – these little beauties are so yummy and while they’re a bit messy to put together, they’re well worth it. If you have a food processor, you can make quick work of the zucchini and the rest is really just squeezing out the water, mixing it all up & pan-frying. The remoulade I went with was from Everyday Happy Herbivore. I love Lindsay’s recipes – they are so simple and so healthy, although I cheated and used Nayonaise instead of making my own mayo for the remoulade. I’ve also been on a bit of a blackened tofu kick lately, and the remoulade seemed like a nice add on to that as well as for the zucchini cakes. It was really good. The nice thing about doing tofu this way is that there’s no need to marinate, so you can do it at the last minute. Our CSA also yielded some beautiful heirloom tomatoes, so what else could we do besides slice one up, let it soak up some balsamic vinegar and nom nom nom. I just do the corn in the grill pan – it gets the nice caramelized kernels and can pretty much be left alone (except for turning it occasionally) while everything else cooks. Yummy summer eating.