How to fit four zucchini into a quart-sized canning jar

My sister wrote recently to say,

I got "zucchini shamed" at the market the other week.  Another shopper told me, as I was picking out a few zucchinis, that having to buy zucchinis is a sign that you don’t have enough friends.  I replanted my zucchinis (chickens got the first round) and am hoping to get a big enough batch to make sure my friends are well stocked.

Me, my zucchinis and summer squashes are coming in fast-and-furious (well, not "furious" -- perhaps "fast-and-festive"?), but not in my garden and not from friends.   My CSA is gifting me and my next-door neighbor with gourd-upon-gourd.  And, because my neighbor is heading out of town soon, I'm inheriting her share, which means my squash-stash is larger yet.  And I still have sliced summer-squash in the freezer from last year!  So I'm swimming in squash these days.  I've definitely been looking for good ways to eat and/or save these babies for later eating.  

I'm not big on zucchini bread or cake (I could imagine adding zucchini to bread or cake I was making for other purposes, but I don't want to make a bunch of starchy stuff whose sole purpose is to be a vegetable vehicle).  I love adding sliced squash to soups, but there's only so much soup a person can take on hot summer days.  

So, I just want to put in a plug for drying zucchini.   The east coast has been bathed in a heat wave recently, and so my homemade solar dehydrator has been operating at peak performance.  My backyard motto this past week  has been Sol, solar, solest!  (I have no idea what that means; I just like the way it sounds).

Drying sliced zucchini has a number of awesome advantages.   Whoop! Among these are:

• Preserving:  dried zucchini are good for about a year, so I don't have to watch my gourds wrinkle, wither, and rot in the course of two sad weeks in the refrigerator.
• Reduced space:  four hefty zucchinis, after drying, condensed down to a space of about a large canning jar.  After noshing on a few of these, we did in fact manage to fit the remainder into a quart-sized jar.
• Shelf storage:  I could freeze these instead, but (as last-year's squash keeps reminding me), it's hard to make good use of freezer veggies, because hunting through a freezer is just not anywhere as easy as looking on a shelf in the pantry basement.
• Reconstitution:  Dried zucchinis plump right back up and make awesome additions to soups, especially tomato-y soups.  Mmmmm.

But most of all, and especially surprising:

Seven salted Summer Squash

• Dried zucchini make excellent snacks.  Drying these babies somehow brings out the sweetness in them.  The snack comes out a bit like a cross between potato chips and popcorn, although with a bit of extra vegetable flavor.   N-son would disagree; he tasted one and did not like it one whit, he said.  But my husband, after trying one, started chowing down on them.  K-daughter also expressed surprise after tasting one, and had another helping.
  
  The second batch I made, I salted lightly before drying them.  Wowzers, are they good!  In fact, I offered some of those back to my neighbor, who had just gotten through a litany of the many ways she was done with squash, and she, like my husband and K-daughter, grabbed extra handfuls of the dried, salted crisps in my canning jar and noshed on them. 

So there you have it: yet another way to turn a bunch of large imposing vegetables into appetizing appetizers.  mmm.