Yummy Malaysiana: zucchini rice gratin

As promised, I am here to aid you with you midsummer afternoons zucchini nightmare, er, bounty. But please, just because I try to help people who werent wary enough of friends bearing baskets of zucchini doesnt mean that I should be mistaken for someone who never lets zucchini expire on her watch. I went away for the weekend and left my last haul to meet a terrible end in my kitchen. Let this gratin be my zucchini repentance.

I started making this zucchini rice gratin a few years ago. At the time, well, rice wasnt my thing. I wouldnt say I didnt like it, just that it never, ever occurred to me to make it, which likely related to the fact that I burned it 100% of the time I made it, which led to pot-soaking and -scrubbing and a plague about our apartment known as a Grumpy Dishwasher. It hardly seemed worth it for a bit of rice. Ive since figured out that nearly every package of rice lists the wrong amount of water (I always need more) and that on the gas stoves Ive had, even the thinnest wisp of a flame, the lowest I can make it before the burner goes out entirely, will cook my rice in about 2/3 of the suggested time. I share these tips just in case any of you out there also need to go to Rice Remedial ! School, though you guys seem smart. I bet youve got this figured out already, and long before you wrote a cookbook that uses it no less than three times.