If you find yourself the recipient of a zucchini dropped off in the dead of night, take heart.
The New Westminster Public Library has cookbooks aplenty to help you use up this unexpected (but surely not unwanted?) bounty.
If you know you have more than you can easily cook up or bake, try your hand at canning. The Dorling Kindersley publication Preserve It! has instructions for preserves, salting and curing, and smoking - and 10 recipes to make use of those pesky vegetables.
Could sweet zucchini relish be a candidate for the mournful marrow pile on your kitchen counter? Pat Crocker's Preserving is a lovely book arranged by season, and it includes instructions for canning and freezing food. Perhaps the five spice zucchini pickles will grace your larder - or someone else's at Christmastime.
If you fancy a salad, but are looking to move beyond your current repertoire, Patricia Wells' Salad as a Meal is a feast for your eyes that will give you many ideas for feasts on your plate. Provence on a Plate is particularly intriguing. The beautiful photographs will make you feel as though you are on holiday, too.
The library also has Salad Days by Pam Powell as a downloadable ebook, with 105 recipes for organic salads and their dressings.
And if you need a wealth of inspiration to use up a surfeit of zucchini, then perhaps Zucchini: You Can Never Have Enough by John Butler will assist you in this endeavour. Besides soups, loaves and salsas, you could even plan a multi-course meal.
How about zucchini-coconut curry soup, followed by zucchini soufflés, then zucchini apple pie? The charmingly illustrated Classic Zucchini Cookbook offers 225 recipes for all kinds of squash, including a decadent sounding recipe for zucchini bars.
After all this, if you just need a recipe for chocolate and zucchini cake, because all these cookbooks are stressing you out, try: bit.ly/9ENl0k (scroll down for recipe).
