Tag: zucchini

So, a few weeks ago, our dishwasher decided to stop working – the motor just up and died one afternoon.  After calling in the local repair shop for their professional review of the situation, the prognosis was not good: not worth repairing, time to but a new dishwasher.  For the past 6 weeks, we’ve been handwashing the dishes, morning, noon and night while we checked out Consumer Reports ratings and priced various models.  Finally, this past Monday we took a trip over to Appliance Arama in Plainfield to pick out the model we wanted.  Plainfield, New Jersey is what is considered an urban enterprize zone, designed to encourage business growth and stimulate local economies in New Jersey; as such, they are permitted to charge half of the standard sales tax rate on certain purchases.  We were able to take advantage of the reduced sales tax, along with some pretty good up-front pricing, combined with two manufacturer rebates, and I decided to save an additional $125 by installing the dishwasher myself.  This morning the new dishwasher was delivered, and a few hours later we were out of the hand-washing business once and for all. 

It rained pretty much all day today, which combined with some pretty high relative humidity to make it an overall nasty day. I did wander out to the backyard to catch up on harvesting some of the tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers and a single mature broccoli growing in the garden; much to my surprise, hiding under some leaves was the mother of all zucchinis.  The fruit measured 17″ in length, 14″ at its maximum girth, and weighed 5.4 pounds.  A minute later, I found another, somewhat smaller monster zucchini:  15″ length, 12″ girth, 3.6 pounds. 

That’s some serious zucchini.