Diet Friendly Fast Food

A few years ago I shared  Al's Famous Hngarian Cucumber Salad, and that amazing recipe from my friend Al has been a huge hit with everyone who tries it.  When I made that salad with Al, we talked about cooking together again, but I'm sorry to report that it's taken us nearly two years to tackle another Hungarian dish together.  Then I saw Al and his girlfriend Judy at a party recently and we made a plan for them to come over and make Hungarian Summer Squash with Sour Cream, Paprika, and Dill.  This Hungarian dish uses a combination of  zucchini and yellow squash with all those Hungarian flavors I like so much, and it turned out to be just as good as the cucumber salad.  We had a great time making it a few days ago, and if you have summer squash in the garden, you must try this recipe!

(Updated with better photos and step-by-step instructions, August 2014)  One of the wonderful things about having summer squash in your vegetable garden is that soon you'll have so much of it you feel perfectly justified in picking them when they're tiny, similar to the baby squash you get in the fanciest of restaurants. I first posted this wonderful recipe for Easy Roasted Baby Summer Squash with Feta and Thyme back on 2007 when I had an abundance of baby squash from my garden, but now that I don't have a garden at the new house (yet!) I buy the packages of baby squash from Costco to make this. If you don't have a garden or a Costco membership you can still make this recipe with larger squash that are cut in strips.  Roasting the squash with fresh thyme concentrates the flavor in vegetables in the most lovely way, but dried thyme will also work fine for this recipe.

I re-did the photos for this recipe with my niece Kara and her adorable four-year-old daughter Quinn.  It had been a long cooking day and Quinn was getting tired of entertaining herself, so I grabbed a kid-safe knife and enlisted her to help cut the baby squash in half.  Quinn has pretty strong food preference, as most kids do at that age, and the whole time we were cutting them up she kept saying "I hate zucchini."  But when the finished dish was ready, she surprisingly agreed to take a bite, and even more surprisingly, she liked it and ate a couple of pieces.  So if you have kids who won't eat their vegetables, maybe getting them to help cook will help!