Our capers can appear anywhere. My mom used to mix them with soft herbs and olive oil to make a sort of coarse salsa verde and spoon it over fried or roasted cauliflower. She also incorporated them into a German-style potato salad with onions, mustard, and broth. Her father would fry capers and serve them with asparagus or use them in involtini. Thin slices of veal wrapped in breadcrumbs, capers and herb stuffing, seared and simmered in white wine sauce. Capers with fried zucchini are served with sliced meatloaf or meatballs.
I love all of these applications of capers, but I find the last combination with zucchini the most seductive. Sticking to our family tradition of tinkering with family traditions, I often use it in pasta and pasta salads, a use my grandmother and father never thought of.
With something creamy and rich in contrast to the sourness, I found fried zucchini with earthy capers to be a great base for pasta. Usually I use buffalo mozzarella or a generous amount of grated pecorino melted in the sauce to make a very cheesy pasta to make the lightly pickled zucchini shine.
However, my version here has no cheese and no meat. The rich creaminess comes from slow cooking more zucchini, first in olive oil for 5 minutes, then with dry pasta and water, resulting in a wonderful starchy sauce that coats everything with a thick sheen. Become. Fried zucchini and capers are added after everything is cooked to break it up and bring extra texture and fresh acidity.
To me, all of this makes perfect sense as the next step in the evolution of my grandmother’s fried zucchini. Perhaps by making a few memory choices and breaking a few small rules, I was able to create a new family tradition.
