Like a lot of Americans, we’re watching Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy on CNN. It airs on Sunday nights, though we confess to watching it on a weekend afternoon, thanks to the magic of a DVR. Now that football season is over, it’s our excuse to slack off for part of the day with the excuse that we’re working, right? (This blog post is supposed to make us feel less guilty.)

Tucci’s schtick in the series is that food tells the story of place, and that each place is unique. We wrote something to that effect ourselves some years ago in the PBS series companion book, The Meaning of Food.

Episode 1 was devoted to Naples (pizza), Ischia (rabbit in tomato sauce), and the Amalfi coast (pasta with zucchini). It’s a charming series and makes us dream of the day when we can return to Italy and keep exploring the corners we haven’t visited yet.

A real cheerleader for Italy and for Italian food, Tucci enlists chefs and other experts to relate the stories behind certain dishes and offer some interesting if surprising hypotheses. For example, one expert suggests that Neapolitans took to deep-frying their food to avoid getting sick from cholera. Could be—although that doesn’t explain why the cooking style is ubiquitous in the Mediterranean basin.

But details, details. The show is worth watching for Tucci’s enthusiasms and for the way it constantly reminds us that all the different Italian cuisines spring from fresh local products. Thus, the pizza segment includes a visit to the San Marzano D.O.P. region for fresh tomatoes and a stop at a small dairy that makes bufalo mozzarella cheese.

We’d been hoping to reproduce the zucchini and pasta dish that Tucci and wife Felicity Blunt so loved, but when they showed up at a restaurant on the Amalfi coast for a cooking lesson, we became just a little discouraged. Sure, the pasta is dried. But the dish cries out for slices of finger-sized zucchini deep-fried in a vat of sunflower oil and rested overnight. Then it’s tossed with fresh basil and butter and hot pasta. We looked out the window at the snow sifting down and realized we weren’t getting baby zukes and just-picked basil anytime soon, or even in the next five months or so.

But we did have some smallish zucchini left over from another recipe we had been trying—the bonus or onus of having to order veggies online, depending on your point of view. And while we were fresh out of fresh basil, we did manage to freeze almost a pint of pesto the last time we were able to get a big bouquet of fresh leaves. A little consultation with our go-to guide for Italian cooking, Michele Scicoline‘s 1,000 Italian Recipes, and we had a recipe that approximated the dish Stanley and Felicity swooned over on TV.

While it’s an important truth that Italian cuisine is built on fresh ingredients, it’s also true that Italian-American cuisine is built on what you can get. In that spirit we adapted Michele’s recipe to the ingredients we had on hand. It made a delicious lunch—and made us long for the Amalfi coast with its rugged vistas, amazing lemons, and, apparently, excellent zucchini.

FRIED ZUCCHINI AND PASTA

serves 2

INGREDIENTS

DIRECTIONS

Heat oil in large frying pan and add zucchini. Cook, turning now and then, until lightly browned and tender (about 10 minutes). Push zucchini to edge of pan and add garlic. Cook until garlic begins to brown. Season with salt and pepper, then add parsley and thyme. Cook another minute. Stir zucchini back in and blend in pesto. Keep pan warm while cooking pasta.

Add spaghetti and salt to boiling water and cook pasta until al dente. Drain, reserving some cooking liquid to add to the final dish to keep it saucy. Add drained pasta to frying pan and twirl with zucchini mixture. Add cheese all at once and swirl in. Serve immediately.