This community-supported agriculture experiment has surprising benefits. I’ve eaten more zucchini in the past week than I have in the preceding year. It’s the combination of:

• loss aversion: powerful force in behavioural psychology
• lack of choice: commitment device; also makes surprising contributions to happiness – people feel unhappy when overloaded by choice; I know I sometimes blank at the supermarket, and my lists are sub-optimal because they focus only on a small set of produce
• thousands of Internet pages dealing with zucchini recipes: because lots of other people have been in the same boat

The other day, I made zucchini fritters. Today I decided to make zucchini pancakes. I mostly followed the recipe, except for the following moments:

• “Soy milk? I’m fine with dairy, so I’ll just use regular milk.”
• “Ground flax seeds. Hmm, I can do that… <grind grind grind> ARGH, this is taking forever! I’ll just add some egg replacement powder.”
• “Honey… Hey, that’s not vegan. Fortunately, we don’t have any dietary restrictions. I wonder if it works with crystallized honey…”

Result: W- woke up to a yummy and filling breakfast. He said, “Is it the weekend already? Did I sleep all Friday?”

I like zucchini pancakes more than I like zucchini fritters. This zucchini brownie recipe I’m trying needs some work, though. It’s a bit dry and crumbly. I hate to admit it, but I think it needs more zucchini. Then again, I didn’t quite follow the recipe for that one. The other two zucchini turned out to be cucumbers, so this batch has just one zucchini. I’ll try it again with the next CSA batch. (Because there’s always more zucchini…)

Zucchini zucchini zucchini. Slowly getting the hang of this!