Main Dish Zucchini Recipes

Tuna Stuffed Zucchini - Photo: Pixabay

With summer coming to an end, you probably have an overabundance of zucchini from your garden that you are trying to find recipes for. Or maybe you know someone who is trying to find homes for all of their excess zucchini!  You'd be amazed at all the meals you can create with zucchini.  Here are just a few ideas.

Stuffed Zucchini

5 medium zucchini

1/4 brown rice, uncooked

1/2 c. boiling water

1 small onion, chopped finely

1 clove garlic, minced

1/2 c. parsley, chopped finely

1/4 c. olive oil

1/2 c. bread crumbs

1 lemon

1 egg, separated

1 c. mushrooms, chopped finely (optional)

1/2 c. cheddar cheese, grated

Salt and pepper

Hollow out zucchini with a spoon. After scooping out zucchini, chop remaining insides into small pieces. In a medium-sized saucepan, cook rice with water, onion, garlic, salt, pepper, and oil for about 15 minutes. Add chopped zucchini and cook 5 more minutes. Add bread crumbs, parsley, juice from the lemon, the egg white, mushrooms, and cheese. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place filling into zucchini shells. Arrange the zucchini in a baking dish. Spread extra filling around the shells in the bottom of the pan. Cover with foil and bake about 40 minutes.

Zucchini & Rice Casserole

3 tbsp. olive oil

5 or 6 fresh basil leaves, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 medium onion, chopped

2 c. brown rice, cooked

2 medium zucchini, sliced

1/4 c. breadcrumbs

4 oz. monterey jack cheese, grated

Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a medium-sized bowl, combine olive oil, salt, pepper, basil, and garlic. Spread the rice in the bottom of a 13x9x2-inch baking dish. Arrange half of the zucchini on top of the rice. Sprinkle with bread crumbs and cheese. Spoon some of the sauce on next. Sprinkle with the chopped onion. Add a layer of the remaining zucchini slices. Top with remaining sauce. Bake, uncovered until vegetables are tender (about 1 1/2 hours).

Zucchini pancakes - Photo: Flickr

Zucchini Pancakes

3 c. zucchini, grated

2 eggs

3 tbsp. flour

1/4 c. Parmesan cheese

1/2 teaspoon salt

Pepper

Butter

In a medium-sized bowl, mix together zucchini and salt. Let stand about 45 minutes. Squeeze excess moisture from zucchini. In another bowl, beat eggs well. Add zucchini, flour, cheese, and pepper; mix well. In a large skillet, melt some butter. Fry tablespoonfuls of the zucchini mixture until lightly browned, turning once. Makes about 12 pancakes.

Zucchini & Cheese Enchiladas

2 medium zucchini, grated

1 c. ricotta or cottage cheese

1 small onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 c. mushrooms (optional)

2 c. cheddar cheese, grated

1 (26-oz.) jar pasta or spaghetti sauce

8 flour tortillas

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a medium-sized bowl, combine zucchini, cottage cheese, onion, garlic, mushrooms, and 1 c. of cheddar cheese. Pour half of the pasta sauce into the bottom of a 13x9x2-inch baking dish. Spoon zucchini mixture into each of the flour tortillas. Roll each tortilla and place seam-side down in the baking pan. Sprinkle remaining zucchini mixture (if any) on top. Pour the remaining pasta sauce on top and sprinkle with remaining cheese. Bake for 30 minutes. 

Author: Rachel Paxton

Summer Smoothies

Milk Shake - Photo: Pixabay

The summer sun swelters outside. Inside it is warm, the fruit bowl sits lusciously on the window sill, bursting with seasonal plenty – peaches, mangoes, grapes as well as the year-round banana. All of the fruit is at a point of perfect ripeness, begging to be eaten right now before it descends into a pool of pulp. It could have stayed in the fridge and been brought out in economical relays to ripen for a day, but there is something about a full fruit bowl, a promise of health and succulence, that time and again makes me arrange it as a still life, as I unpack the shopping, only to be wrong-footed when it all ripens at the same time.  Typically the children are only bothering to eat apples, which last forever in the fridge. Desperate measures are called for.

It is time to make smoothies. Even children, who wouldn’t give a second glance to raw fruit, can usually be beguiled by a smoothy. It is also a special treat for adults, an easy thing to do for visitors who drop by when it’s too hot for tea. Any ripe fruit can be used, even if it is slightly overripe, as long as it still smells good and not fermenting.  You get a mega-dose of vitamins, plus calcium from the yogurt and milk, almost a meal in itself. Healthy eating in a glass!

Giving a recipe for a smoothy is hardly necessary. It depends on what you have in the house already. Use this example as a template and adapt and change it as you like. As long as you use fruit that is truly ripe, it’ll be delicious. The one essential piece of equipment is a liquidizer or food processor, without that I’d just have to force feed the children the fruit as is, it is far too laborious to puree fruit by hand on a hot summer’s day. The joy of making smoothies is the effortlessness. 

No set quantities, but as a guide, I’d use one mango with one or two bananas. Just peel and stone the fruit, fling it into the liquidizer with a large dollop of plain yogurt and a cup of milk and blitz. If it is too thick for your liking add more milk.  Chuck in some ice cubes for instant chill factor.

A tip for dealing with mangoes: without peeling, slice off both the long sides as close to the stone as you can., cut the flesh in a criss-cross fashion to make 1cm cubes, without going right through the skin, then push the skin up to invert the cubes into a mango hedgehog! The children eat them like this and a very messy business it is, needing a bath afterward.

Suggestions for fruit combinations:

Mango and banana

Pear, berry, and banana

Peach and berry

Strawberry and banana

Peach, apricot, and banana

Any fruit in the whole wide world can be added to this list, experiment with whatever is in season and make up your own combinations.

Bananas make a good background for most other fruits and give a good velvety texture, besides being the most likely fruit to have around overripe. If you want to move away from the healthy fruit scenario, you can use bananas with a few teaspoons of hot chocolate to make a scrummy, decadent milkshake. Or go the whole way and put a blob of vanilla ice-cream in too. I remember as a child, my mother adding a raw egg to ours to build us up. It made it wonderfully frothy, but then nobody worried about salmonella in those days – I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have a guaranteed source of salmonella-free eggs.

If you have berries of any sort stashed in the freezer, you can throw in a handful still frozen and watch the color transform as you blitz. Mulberries, blackberries, youngberries, blueberries all add deep color and plenty of useful nutrients, loads of anti-oxidants – instant immune boosters in winter if you can keep them until then. I usually freeze strawberries as puree, when the strawberry harvest overwhelms us, so can bring it out for a change later on in the year. The other berries I freeze whole, stalks and leaves picked off, so they are ready to use. You can also buy frozen berries in mixed packs, which would work fine.

Whatever fruit you’re using, let the children press the buttons on the liquidizer and then dole out the smoothie, in glasses with straws, easy in the knowledge that the vitamin quota for the day is being filled.

Copyright 2006 Kit Heathcock

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The Joy Of Summer Sweet Corn

Summer is coming, and one of the most anticipated treats is the delight of enjoying a fresh ear of sweet corn brushed with melted butter. Corn on the cob is delicious, but there’s more than one way to serve fresh corn. Along with the corn harvest comes a big variety of other vegetables and dishes.

When you cut the corn from the cob, the possibilities for preparing corn are endless. You can add it to bread to make a wonderful spoon bread recipe, or a great Southern favorite, corn pudding. Corn combines well with other summer vegetables such as tomatoes, bell peppers, and onions. The secret to a great dish is to use the freshest corn available. The less time that passes between the garden and the finished recipe the better.

When you’re selecting corn, choose ears with tight, green husks and tender milky looking kernels that are evenly spaced on the ear and firm enough to puncture if you squeeze it a little. If you’re not going to be preparing your corn immediately after you get it home, then buy it with the husks and put it in the refrigerator to prevent the sugar in the corn from turning to starch and tasting less than sweet. If your recipe calls only for kernels of corn, remember that two average size ears will usually give you about one cup of corn kernels.

Here’s a delicious summer corn recipe to try out this year.

Corn and Tomato Casserole

Photo: Pixabay

8 slices bacon, cut in half

2 c soft breadcrumbs

2 c peeled, chopped fresh tomatoes

1 med green pepper, chopped

3 c fresh corn cut from cob

¼ tsp salt

¼ tsp sugar

¼ tsp pepper

¼ c butter, melted

Place half of the bacon in a shallow 2 qt casserole, and top with 1 c breadcrumbs. Layer half of tomatoes, green pepper, and corn over breadcrumbs; sprinkle with half of salt, sugar, and pepper. Repeat layers of the veggies and seasoning. Combine the melted butter and remaining 1 c breadcrumbs, stirring well; spoon evenly over casserole. Top with remaining bacon; bake at 375 F for 40-45 minutes. Serves 8.

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