Its raining zucchini… actually its more like flooding…or maybe its time for pizza?

Zucchini season is in full swing. When I was looking up new zucchini recipes last week, I found that August 8 is actually ‘National Leave Zucchini on Your Neighbours’s Porch Day’  The idea was that you snuck over to your neighbour’s place and stealthily placed zucchini on their porch… this if your neighbour has a porch of course… or doesn’t have a gate… or a dog…. or ?     I think that concept is more figuratively than literal, but I did have a good chuckle as I pictured myself dressed all in black, at night…. sneaking around with baseball bat sized zucchini….
What I did find was some great websites for recipes.  One gal had 20 ways to use zucchini.  In amongst all of them I found a few that really caught my eye. This one seems to be the winner.  I put up a brief description on FB already but thought I had better follow with a blog.

And the winner is zucchini pizza!  It’s really simple and works tremendously on the hot days as it’s all on the grill.  Most people have not picked zucchini at its prime when its nice and slender, so once it gets to about 3 inch diameter, its perfect for this.  Any larger and the centre gets a little too weak.
Get the grill hot and oil it for non-sticking purposes. Slice the zucchini on the round, about 3/4 inch thick. Grill for 8 minutes with the lid closed.  Remove the slices to a pan, grilled side up, and bring to where the rest of your ingredients are.  I found it easier to just bring back into the kitchen to assemble instead of bringing all the ingredients to the grill.

I started with pizza sauce, then added diced ham and pineapple tidbits.On this occasion I made 12, so I did 6 for Don and 6 for me. For his I used goat mozzarella.  For mine just regular.

In the picture, the top cheese is the regular, cow’s mozza, and the lower stuff is the goat mozza.  You can see that the regular one is more yellow… it’s because of the fat content….its higher.  I have made mozzarella from scratch… (see one of my earlier posts) and the full fat mozza comes out far more yellow.

I had some left over bacon bits and chives from last night’s baked potatoes, so I decided to add them to the tropical theme.
Now they went back on the grill for another 8 minutes.  I did them over low heat but had the other 2 burners on high.  The grill then operated like an oven and the cheese got nice a browned up.

And then they were ready to eat.  Bon appetit.

 

Zucchini… not quinoa super food….but more prolific… absolutely!

After a few REALLY warm days here…which is REALLY sad… because here on the wet-coast… we have had a crap summer so any warm day, we are jumping around rejoicing….. anyways back to the result of the WARM day.  Everything in the garden grew…(how does your garden grow you ask?)  Yesterday afternoon I went and picked the zucchini and contemplated whether they were the ‘perfect’ size…. were they too small?  hmmm…. so I picked 3 of them and added them to the 1 1/2 that I already had in the kitchen… well today, there were 6 more.  Yes 6!  Yesterday they were teeny, today they are regular sized…   so that means that today they grew 4 inches.  Nature never ceases to amaze me.  So I took up the challenge to post out some non-bread zucchini recipes. 

Did I mention that along with the zukes, there were beans, carrots, cucumbers, potatoes and peppers.  OK, so right now we need to turn into vegetarians so that we can get through all this bounty.  This is what I did:

Onions, garlic and biased carrots in the fry pan with some olive oil and salt.

Next was the zucchini and then the green beans….

Meanwhile I put two chicken legs into the pressure cooker… YES… the pressure cooker.. which is another post altogether.  It’s an electric pressure cooker and was highly recommended from the Chef at the Culinary Institute of America.  Like a good little student, I went and got myself one… I will post about it later cause I LOVE IT.

Anyways… I also cooked up some potatoes cause the shovel had gone thru a few of them and they needed to be cooked. Usually I would have just made the big pan of veg to go with the chicken, but to add just a smidge of mashed potatoes into the mix….. well lets just say … yum.  And fresh parsley too mixed in too!

So the end result is a stir fry of veg.  The zucchini breaks down a fair bit if you leave it and coats the rest of the veg.  I know, a healthier choice….would be firmer, brighter zucchini, but using it as the ‘sauce’ on the rest of the veg works great and is way less calories than a real sauce.

I hope you try it and enjoy it.