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Call them what you will: fleurs de courgettes, fiori di zucca, or the coarse English "squash blossoms." They're flowers. They're edible. They're delicious. 
I was introduced to them in France, in the simplest preparation possible in a restaurant whose menu was scrawled on a chalkboard, the back of which read "Pas de telephone, pas de cartes de crédite, pas de problème." Feel free to go - it's La Merenda in Nice, France. But don't expect fleurs de courgettes because they'd only be on the menu if they are in the market down the street. The blossoms are extremely fragile - if you see them at a market they were picked that morning and if you don't use them that night or by the following morning at the latest, you might as well toss them. But if you find them, rearrange whatever plans you have to make the time to cook and eat them. The simplest way to cook them, which admittedly takes some finesse, is to lightly batter and fry them. Use the light flour-and-water batter called pastella which I found in Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Italian Cooking." In short: well-mixed 2/3 cup of flour to 1 cup water. This batter is awesome - thin, light, and crispy, it turns golden and slightly toasty brown when done, forming a nice shell around the battered food.
There are two kinds of squash blossoms - some have mini-squash instead of stems. You can do anything you like with these mini-squash - I sliced my up and fried them as zucchini fries. They're meatier and moister than potato, and I think I like them better. Still crispy, but not as bland and starchy. Some recipes call for doing fancy things with these squash-stems, which can be very pretty. 
The blossoms themselves are a little awkward to handle because they're delicate and floppy. First you have to clean them gently (cold running water is good) and remove the stamen from the center of the flower. If you're frying them, drag them through the batter to coat them all over and then let excess batter drip off before frying. Fry them in enough oil that they are half-submerged, hot enough that the oil bubbles and hisses energetically immediately when they're put in. When one side is golden brown, flip and repeat. 
Drain excess oil and eat as soon as possible. The challenge with these blossoms is that they can carry enough batter and take long enough to cook that they get a little lost. Cooked well, they're light and crispy, but still have some substance. Their flavour is typically very mild, slightly earthy but also clean and fresh and crisp and green. In fact, many recipes call for stuffing them with goat cheese fillings because they function very well as wrappers that complement the flavour of fresh goat cheese while not disintegrating under heat like other leafy vegetables. I prefer them plain - I think the cheese makes them overly heavy and rich and drowns the delicate flavour of the delicate flower.
I love the simplicity of fiori di zucca - it's a flower, like so many others. It displays the intent of the plant to produce a fruit. And in this case, we get to taste that remarkable evanescent potential for fruit. It's like eating a crispy golden moment in time.
In Jerusalem, in the old city, there are bakeries. As you walk down the narrow, roofed-over streets, occasionally you'll catch a wafting smell of fresh baking. Follow your nose. Most of the bread being baked is pita - puffy and dusty-sweet. If you can see into the oven, you can watch as the dough goes from a raw, flat, white round to a toasty-tan balloon in about 30 seconds, before either it tumbles from the oven's mechanical conveyor belt or it is yanked skillfully from the brick oven and tossed onto a large wooden tray to cool. 
The bakeries were of all sorts. A basement of a basement with what looked like a kiln built into the back wall at the very bottom - stacks of trays of dough on one side and fresh pita piled high being hauled up and out onto the street for delivery as soon as the tray was piled high enough. Or a one-room workshop on a side street with an ancient (though not on the middle-eastern timescale) mechanical pass-through oven with a metal-plate conveyor. 
And that doesn't even consider the semi-industrial operation I saw in a Jordanian bakery where the pita oven was on the upper floor and the pitas cooled as they whizzed down a chute to land on the counter next to a man who had to package them up in equal-sized bags - very quickly, I should add. 
I found the baker with the conveyor-belt oven because of the trays he had arranged outside his workshop from which he was selling fresh pita and what he called Palestinian Pizza. Basically pita dough topped with stuff and sent through the oven, he had two kinds: a "normal" pizza with tomato, cheese, and olives, and "the real thing" topped with a paste of za'tar and olive oil. 
The real thing, reheated briefly in the oven, was sweet, salty, oily, hearty. And hot. It tasted like a hot day in Jerusalem - dusty, and even a little gritty, but with that perfume of eucalyptus and olive. It tasted old. And it was just right.
There's something about being out near a river on a warm, but crisp, day that makes me crave a particular kind of steak. There is something about taking a thick slice of beef tenderloin, stuffing it with garlic and wrapping it with bacon, and then grilling it, preferably over hot coals of a wood fire, until the bacon is crispy and the garlic is soft, that makes me feel alive. It's a complicated desire.
I was recently confronted with the above situation, thankfully with the means to satisfy that craving. Good beef tenderloin is ordinarily delicious, so much so that some of you might call it blasphemy to then poke holes in it and shove in halved garlic cloves - as many as will fit, ideally. And then perhaps it is further blasphemous to wrap the steak in thick slices of applewood-smoked bacon. But holy hell is blasphemy tasty! 
Allow me first to extoll the virtues of good meat and a good butcher: A good butcher is worth his (or her) weight in gold or chocolate - whichever you value most. Animals are complicated, especially the large ones, and carving the perfect steak or chop is an exercise in craftsmanship. There's a reason that, like in the other crafts, butchers would have to apprentice - there's a lot to know that you can't exactly learn in school. And a butcher is someone to whom you rather literally entrust your life. While much less true in the current, highly-regulated food-safety system (despite the pervasive horror stories...,) even now a good butcher will not only strive to give you the perfect piece of meat for your intended purpose but will also make sure that you won't get sick from it, if for no other reason than wanting your repeat business! A good butcher knows where the meat comes from, maybe even knows the farmer, and takes pride in your dinner even if not invited.
Good meat can, theoretically, be obtained anywhere in developed nations. Ok, you might have a hard time finding meat on a vegan, raw-foodist commune, but that's not what I'm talking about. While you can walk into most grocery stores and stagger out under a massive mound of meat, it will probably only cook up to be generically tasty. The few times I've had really good meat, adorned with little and cooked only simply, it has been remarkably rich and complex, and subtle, too. Some will say meat should not be complicated. To that I respond: too late, it already is. Cows and pigs and chickens, to only name the most common, taste different in different places - they eat different things, walk on different ground, drink different water. And let's say nothing about different varieties of cow or pig or chicken (or turkey, since Thanksgiving approacheth.) Beef can be sweet, grassy, like dense sunshine. Or it can be dark, sultry, seductive. Or it can taste of minerals and evergreens - trees and rocks.
This is why I like a good butcher - one with whom you can have a conversation about the flavour of different cuts of different kinds of meat. One with whom you can brainstorm interesting new recipes or consult about reproducing a grandmother's grandmother's roast. One who will understand the want, nay, the need, to stuff a tenderloin to bursting with garlic, wrap it in bacon, and put in on a fire.
Incidentally, that bacon-garlic special is more than ordinarily tasty... The tenderloin is a soft, un-fatty cut. This one was corn-fed regular black angus - mild, but slightly sweet and a little rusty. The garlic doesn't cook all the way. It roasts a bit in the beef juices but the cloves are still sharp and a bit spicy. And the bacon adds a gratuitous baste of smoky fat and saltiness. Unfortuantely, this one was cooked on a gas grill. Convenient, but you don't get the same crispy exterior as when you cook just above the white-hot coals of a 3-hour-old campfire. But that's just a hint of a totally different immersive experience - on in which you might just have to fend off ravenous bears to save your precious steak. Would you? I might - this steak's just that good.
I was introduced to them in France, in the simplest preparation possible in a restaurant whose menu was scrawled on a chalkboard, the back of which read "Pas de telephone, pas de cartes de crédite, pas de problème." Feel free to go - it's La Merenda in Nice, France. But don't expect fleurs de courgettes because they'd only be on the menu if they are in the market down the street. The blossoms are extremely fragile - if you see them at a market they were picked that morning and if you don't use them that night or by the following morning at the latest, you might as well toss them. But if you find them, rearrange whatever plans you have to make the time to cook and eat them. The simplest way to cook them, which admittedly takes some finesse, is to lightly batter and fry them. Use the light flour-and-water batter called pastella which I found in Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Italian Cooking." In short: well-mixed 2/3 cup of flour to 1 cup water. This batter is awesome - thin, light, and crispy, it turns golden and slightly toasty brown when done, forming a nice shell around the battered food. 
The blossoms themselves are a little awkward to handle because they're delicate and floppy. First you have to clean them gently (cold running water is good) and remove the stamen from the center of the flower. If you're frying them, drag them through the batter to coat them all over and then let excess batter drip off before frying. Fry them in enough oil that they are half-submerged, hot enough that the oil bubbles and hisses energetically immediately when they're put in. When one side is golden brown, flip and repeat. 
Drain excess oil and eat as soon as possible. The challenge with these blossoms is that they can carry enough batter and take long enough to cook that they get a little lost. Cooked well, they're light and crispy, but still have some substance. Their flavour is typically very mild, slightly earthy but also clean and fresh and crisp and green. In fact, many recipes call for stuffing them with goat cheese fillings because they function very well as wrappers that complement the flavour of fresh goat cheese while not disintegrating under heat like other leafy vegetables. I prefer them plain - I think the cheese makes them overly heavy and rich and drowns the delicate flavour of the delicate flower. 
