Along with happy memories, we brought some local produce back home from our camping trip in the Adirondacks…including a HUGE zucchini. Let’s just say that by the end of the week, we were all “zucchinied” out for a while. I will buy smaller zucchinis in the future though, because it is a vegetable that everyone in my family liked. Score! Does your family like zucchini? If so, let me share the five ways that I cooked the zucchini that week. (I hate to waste food, but I did throw away the last bit of the zucchini. Yes, after being used in five dishes, there was still some of that same zucchini left over. No mas! :-))
1. Penne with grilled chicken and zucchini: I had mentioned to Reggie that I needed to think of a way to use the zucchini. The same night, we were watching “Extra Virgin” on the Cooking Channel and they just so happened to be cooking a dish with zucchini. (The cooking show features actress Debi Mazar and her Italian husband. I’m not a regular viewer, but it caught my attention that night since I was focused on zucchinis.) They cooked the zucchini with olive oil and a red onion for their kids to take to school for lunch. In my version of this recipe, I changed the penne to whole grain, added some garlic and made a couple of other variations. (I don’t know if they ever posted their recipe, because I don’t see it on their site.)
2. Zucchini bread: I used Paula Deen’s Zucchini Bread recipe on the Food Network for this. I just did not include the nuts, because my guys don’t especially like nuts in their food. I also baked them as muffins rather than as bread so that they would be more likely to eat them. (They will at least try almost anything if it’s in muffin form.) I’m glad that I did that, because the bright green color of the baked zucchini in the muffins kind of freaked them out at first. (It is pretty bright.) However, once they tried one muffin, they kept gobbling them down…as did visiting friends.
3. Spaghetti with turkey meat sauce and zucchini: I just chopped up some of the zucchini and cooked it with some chopped onions in a frying pan before adding the ground turkey meat and spaghetti sauce. (That reminds me that I want to share how to make a super easy homemade marinara sauce.)
4. Veggie scramble: I included zucchini with my regular favorite vegetables (red pepper, green pepper and onions), scrambled it up with a couple of eggs and topped it with some freshly grated mozzarella cheese. Yum!
5. Beef and veggie Spanish rice mix: By the end of the week, I was tired of zucchini, but there was still too much left to throw it away. So I cooked it in a frying pan with the last of the red onion and green pepper of the week. I added some ground beef. When everything was well cooked, I added some yellow Spanish rice that I had cooked. Finally, it was the last zucchini meal of the week.
I am happy to say that all five dishes were tasty. Everyone in my family (including Sean!) ate everything but the veggie scramble. They probably would have eaten that too if I had offered it to them. Instead, I had just made one for myself while Sean was at pre-k one morning.