Skip to main content

Squash Patties and Tomato Gravy


It's summer in Texas, so tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, peppers, okra, and squash are all in abundance. And since it's summer, both my sons are away in different states at the moment, so my ability to cook and eat vegetables to my heart's content is also abundant. I've been scouring community cookbooks, my collection of recipes, and my grandmother's clippings for summer vegetable dishes and pulled out this one from "Molly's Corner ," a column written by Hallettsville native, Molly Pesek. According to her obituary, Molly (1925-1986) was also a correspondent for the Victoria Advocate for some time. She was also the vice president of Pesek Memorial Company, which produced the headstone for my mother's grave in Hallettsville.

I don't know if my grandmother knew Molly, but she had clipped many, many of her recipes from the Lavaca County Tribune, some with a Texas-Czech bent, some not. Molly also self-published a cookbook, "Molly's Cookbook with Love", though in 1981, self-publishing meant typing the book yourself on a typewriter and having copies made. I made a copy from my good friend Lori's copy (also a Hallettsville native), who got it from Molly's daughter Connie. The book a fantastic trove of interesting traditional Texas Czech recipes from Molly's friends and family, along with things like Coke Salad, Hot Tamales, and Hummingbird Cake.

I got one enormous zucchini in my Imperfect Produce delivery box last week and a green pepper from Johnson's Backyard Garden at the Sunset Valley Farmer's Market, so I was ready to fry. The "patties" dropped from a spoon into the hot oil to fry, were shaped more like globules or some kind of sea creature; no rhyme or reason to their shape. At 375 degrees, they took about 4-5 minutes per side. Crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, they were just what I wanted eating dinner in front of the TV, binge-watching a series on Amazon Prime. My process photos are below.

I ate the patties with a cool, sour cream dressing-coated cucumber and red onion salad on the side. But I dipped the hot, crispy patties into warm tomato gravy. I have collected a few versions of recipes for this sauce from Texas Czech community cookbooks and they all involve sugar, making the sauce reminiscent of Campbell's Tomato Soup. The version I tried yesterday also included spices I normally associate with Christmas... cinnamon, cloves, allspice. The sauce was too sweet and too heavy on spices for me to try again with savory food, but the combination of the crispy patties (with the sweetness of the bell pepper) and the sauce was surprisingly good. This morning, the leftover batter was just as delicious poured into a frying pan coated with a little olive oil and cooked like an omelette.


All ingredients in a bowl, except for the zucchini.

Zucchini grated and ready to add.

Pattie "batter" all mixed together and ready to fry.

Squash patties served with homemade tomato gravy and a cucumber salad.

Next morning, the leftover batter was just as delicious poured into a frying pan coated with a little olive oil
and cooked like an omelette.

Tomatoes from my friend Lori's garden waiting to be made into Tomato Gravy.



Comments

  1. Both of those squash recipes sound delicious – coming from Molly, they have to be good. I’m adding them to my recipe files for next summer’s squash. I remember Molly Pesek from the Victoria Advocate and I think there are some clippings from her in my mom’s recipe box.
    Linda W.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dawn, your blog is lovely. You are the hippest homebody I have ever known. Sorry to hear of your sweet mother's passing. Glad to see you still have much to cherish in these strange times. Best, Pat

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Buchta with Nuts and Raisins

In his photo book Journeys into Czech Moravian Texas , author Sean N. Gallup wrote a few paragraphs about food in contemporary Texas- Czech culture. During his fieldwork, he observed "Other Texas-Czech pastries [besides kolaches ] include klobasniky .... and buchta , a larger fruit filled loaf.... " (Texas A&M University Press, 1998). Though my grandmother made an apricot buchta (or she just called it a roll), more common buchty might be poppyseed or cream cheese. Less common seems to be the buchta I've made filled with nuts and raisins. The Czech word " buchta " doesn't seem to be surviving as well as the word " kolach " either, for though Gallup mentions it third in a list of common Texas Czech pastries, I've found it almost impossible to find a recipe in a community cookbook that actually uses the word buchta . Instead, I find recipes for "rolls".  Still, Westfest actually has a buchta category in it's annual baking c

What I Learned Making 600 Kolaches

Photo by Lori Najvar. The last week in July, I launched a home baking business called Old School Kolaches,  offering pans of made from scratch kolaches, delivered to customers' doors. I got laid off in April and in reaction to scrolling endlessly through disheartening job boards at 50 years old, I decided I'd try doing something I'm good at and passionate about that might also pay some of my bills (work and love don't always go together unfortunately.) It remains to be seen whether this can be instead of or in additional to a standard 9 to 5 job for me. Austin, though it's the state capitol, is a wasteland when it comes to traditional kolaches. The one place I went to here that had decent kolaches closed down only weeks ago. There are instead two kolache bakery  chains , countless donut shops that offer hotdogs wrapped in croissants or tasteless dough and call them kolaches, or one hipster beer and kolaches place that "elevates the classic Central Texas C

Razor Blade (Green Grape) Pie

Behind my grandmother's house in Hallettsville, TX grows an epic grape vine. As far as my mother knows, it's at least 70 years old since she's 71 and it's been there as long as she can remember. It's impossible to tell where the vine actually comes out of the ground or where the end of the vines reach, since they're draped and snaked around and through and over a chinaberry or hackberry tree and onto a huge oak in front of the barn. It's a source of wonder for my 9-year old who sees the mass of leaves and branches as a combination shady fort / animal graveyard (found an entire large animal's skeleton underneath) / potential snake lair. I talked with the extremely nice Lavaca County A&M AgriLife Extension agent in hopes of identifying the variety of grapes. A quick internet search of photos of leaf shapes revealed that they're muscadine, not mustang grapes, but when they're ripe, they're white/green, not the bronze or purple named in A&a