Our family does yellow squash and zucchini bread and butter pickles. We also do a relish with the squash and red sweet peppers. I like it cut in big thick rounds and breaded, fried and served with simple marinara sauce and cheese. Like a poor man's eggplant parm. Cut it lengthwise, scoop out the seeds, add the seeds and center pulp and chop up with tomatoes, garlic, onions, and seasoned bread crumbs, or plain stale bread cubes, along with minced mushrooms, and some butter and olive oil. Stuff them and bake for 35 minutes at about 400. Last five minutes, top with shredded cheese of your choice. We like romano and parm mixed. Mainate them with other veggies in a nice cold vegetable platter. Dice them and add to fritter batter that you add a good dash of cayenne pepper and jack cheese. Tastes like a poor man's chile rellano. Slice them thin and put them inside omelets with other veggies and cheese. Feta is good. Saute them cut into thick rounds, use olive oil and salt and pepper than give them a tumble with a good parm, let the parm start to brown in places in the pan and then serve hot right out of the pan. Very good! Add them to ratatouille. Serve with nice bread or with pasta. I like cold ratatouille on Italian bread that's been toasted. Slice and use in a vegetable lasagna. Chunk and add with other veggies with alfredo sauce for a Primavera. Add with shrimp in an oil and garlic saute and serve over linguine. Slice raw and serve in salads. Shred them and add pancake mix and buttermilk and an egg until the batter is thick enough to drop off the end of the spoon to make cheap and quick fritters. Make cornmeal pancakes with the squash chunked into the batter with whole corn, diced green and red sweet peppers and diced sweet onions and serve with a rich tomato chile salsa and cheese and sour cream. Make a vegetable soup and add them. Top with floating feather dumplings. Use the squash, onions, peppers, and add it to chunks of Italian sausages that are almost cooked and stuff it into a hoagie roll, broil in the oven for 2 minutes with cheese to melt for a great veggie and sausage hoagie. Fill a bowl with them in the most odd shapes. Throw in some other veggies and make a centerpiece. Tie some ribbions and raffia around the squash. Maybe you'll get some strange goose and duck shaped ones!

You don't have to use whey or any other starter (I don't care for them either) it just takes a bit more salt and a longer fermenting time. You can do the squash like fermented pickles just subbing squash for the cukes. If you use small hard ones they can be done whole or sliced in lengthwise halves. If you go for quarters they tend to mush more. I have never done any sweet fermenting except adding a smidge of sugar to my krauts and Linda Lou's Sweet Pickle Chunks (recipe here) as it is much more complex and while I like those pickles I don't care for any other sweet ferments I have tried. But pull up that recipe and take a look at using it. For the garlic/dills the standard NCHFP Fermented Dills instructions works great. There is also and Alton Brown recipe here for fermented dill pickles you can use. Let me know if you can't find it. Now if you find you really want to get deep into fermenting pick up a copy of Joy of Pickling for all the info you'll need. Hope this helps. Dave http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_06/dill_pickles.html

Not a lot of rules with cooking. Once cooked, easy to freeze. Just don't re-freeze. It dries things out and makes for nasty tasting stuff... blah.

"Recipe" 1. Cut squash into bite size pieces, put into a sauce pan. Dice an onion, add to squash. (Amount of onion determined by your personal taste.) Add about an inch or so of water or broth*, a pat or 2 of butter, salt and pepper to taste. Cover pan, simmer until tender. *Canned tomatoes can be used in place of other liquid. "Recipe" 2. Fry some bacon until crisp, remove from pan & set aside. Drain grease from pan, but leave just a little. Quarter squash lengthwise, then cut quarters into 1/2 inch pieces. Cut an onion in half lengthwise, then slice halves into 1/4 inch slices. Add squash and onion to bacon grease in pan, sauté until onion is transparent and squash is tender. A little browning is fine. Add a can of diced tomatoes, cook until all is heated through. Stir in the crispy bacon and serve immediately. This makes a really attractive dish if you use a variety of summer squash. I like to use yellow squash, zucchini and patty pan (scalloped?) squash. Sorry, I can't say how much of any one ingredient is used, I always just start with the amount of squash I have, or need for the number of people I'll be serving. The rest of the ingredients are "by guess and by golly' according to the amount of squash used. Rusty