Zucchini Frittata

My sister Christine and I were talking on the phone about our zucchini woes today, and she turned me onto the idea of ways to use a lot of zucchini at once. She had made zucchini bread the other day, and had a lot of left over grated zucchini so she sauteed it and used it in spaghetti sauce, and also suggested making a frittata since I already made a pasta sauce with zucchini last week. The grated zucchini's volume reduced tremendously when sauteed. Since I had great ingredients for it on hand, I decided to make a frittata for dinner tonight.

I used:

1 medium green zucchini grated

1 medium yellow squash grated

(combined total of 2 1/2 cups of grated stuff)

2 shallots (use half an onion if you don't have shallots)

5 sun-gold tomatoes (that is all I had ripe on my vine)

2 tablespoons fresh basil chopped

1 tablespoon fresh parsley chopped

3 slices of bacon

1 handful of cubed fresh mozzarella

black pepper to taste

parmesan cheese to top the frittata

4 farm fresh eggs

(makes enough for 8 good size slices.... serve with a yummy crusty bread and a tart-zingy salad which compliments nicely the natural sweetness of the zucchini, tomato, and basil. don't forget your glass of pinot grigio too..)

Start by cooking up your bacon until crispy and set aside.

Dice or thinly slice up your shallots and sauté them in a bit of olive oil. When translucent crank up the heat to high and add the grated zucchini.

Keep an eye on the zucchini, stirring it a lot to make sure it isn't burning on the bottom, and cook until it is reduced to about 1/3 of the volume and there is no liquid visible in the bottom of the pan... Zucchini is mostly water so it will shrink down a lot (yesssss!). Reduce the heat to medium high and add the tomatoes, some fresh black pepper, the basil and parsley. Stir that around until the tomatoes start to break down then put the mixture into a mixing bowl to cool off.

Once the zucchini mixture is cooled... add the chopped bacon, chopped mozzarella, and eggs. I also put a dusting of cayenne pepper but it didn't seem to do much, so I ended up eating mine with some green hot sauce. Yum. Stir it up until everything is combined and the eggs are mixed in well.

Turn on the broiler.

Heat up a 12 inch skillet that has been sprayed with some cooking spray on a medium heat. Pour the egg-zucchini mixture into the skillet and let it cook w/o stirring or scrambling for about 7-8 minutes, or until the eggs are cooked half way through. Grate some fresh parmesan cheese over the entire surface of the frittata, then put the entire skillet into the oven. Make sure your skillet can go in the oven! I put my broiler on high, and the skillet on the 3rd rack from the top for about 5-7 minutes until the eggs were cooked, and the cheese turned brown. viola!

Let the frittata rest for a minute or two before slicing and serving!

happy cooking,

xoxo, char

Frittata with... (guess the ingredient)

What can the secret ingredients be?

Fresh Pasta

Since finding myself in an over abundance of zucchini, I've been searching high and low for creative ways to use the vegetable...

In the last week and a half, I've eaten zucchini bread, grilled zucchini, sauteed zucchini, zucchini in a tomato pasta sauce, and zucchini in a coconut curry with black sea bass.... and left overs of every said dish several times.

Needing some inspiration from preexisting recipes I decided to look at the Food Network website. I ended up finding a recipe by Jamie Oliver for Penne Carbonara with Zucchini. After making it, I found the recipe to be quite greasy, and surprisingly a little too zucchini-y even for myself.

All was not lost; inspired by his most recently acquired kitchen gadget (his dad's pasta roller), Jeff decided to make our own pasta for the Carbonara. Instead of penne, we had home made fettucini! The pasta itself had such a fresh and clean quality to it, it was easy to overlook my disappointment in the sauce on the pasta. Ha.

Making pasta is incredibly easy, and anything uncooked can be frozen which is great to have on hand for quick future meals. I'm really excited about making more pasta in the future.

xoxo

happy noodles

Zucchini Boats

It is zucchini season, and everyone I know has refrigerators overflowing with zucchini and squash right now... including myself. Since I shared this recipe with some of my friends over the weekend, I figured it wouldn't hurt to post it because it is a super fast and easy one!

Zucchini Boat is a dish that my dad grew up eating. I learned to make it when I was about 12 or 13 while visiting my grandmother Virginia (Ginny), and my Aunt Diane and Uncle Joe in West Virginia. That was the summer I learned how to make the best Sloppy Joe filling from Aunt Diane, and Grandma showed me how to bake Italian Bread & Pepperoni Rolls, but those recipes will be posted another day.

Ingredients:

3-4 medium Zucchinis (around 12-14 inches)

1lb Italian Sausage (uncased; if you buy the stuff in the casing, you'll have to squeeze the sausage out of each link.)

1/2 c Parmesan cheese

1c bread crumbs (saltine cracker crumbs can be used also)

1 egg

So for the boats....

Preheat your oven to 350 and boil a big pot of water.

Slice 3 or 4 medium (around 12-14 inches) zucchinis in half lengthwise.

Put the sliced zucchinis in the boiling water for about 7 minutes to soften the flesh for scooping.

Drain and set aside so they can cool off before you scoop out the middle.

In a skillet, brown a pound of Italian sausage (the uncased stuff). Drain off excess grease... at this point I'll even pat the ground sausage with a paper towel to get even more of the fat off. Then throw the sausage into a big mixing bowl.

Now, the zucchinis should be cool enough to handle.

Scoop the middles of the zucchini out with a spoon and put it into the mixing bowl with the sausage. tip: don't scoop out too much because the boats will get too thin and collapse, so leave about a 1/2 inch of flesh.

Add a 1/2 cup of Parmesan cheese, and 1 cup bread crumbs and an egg. Stir up the zucchini middles, bread crumbs, cheese, and egg until the breadcrumbs aren't dry anymore.

Place the hollow zucchini on a large baking sheet that has either been drizzled with a little bit of olive oil or has been sprayed with cooking spray.

Spoon the mixture into the hollow zucchini boats. Bake at 350 for about 45 mins. Since the insides are already cooked (except for the egg), the baking is just to get the top crispy and brown, and so the outer zucchini boat gets tender.

xoxo

happy zucchini

Glass Art

On my last visit to The Question Mark Lounge, my friends Susan and Mellow surprised me with some handmade artwork for my birthday!

This is a close-up shot of the glass and string sandwich that Susan made.  It commemorates all of the string she wasted at my house during our quilt project!  

::wink wink::

Mellow made this groovy metallic piece.  I think it is a landscape from a planet in a far off galaxy. The second surprise of the visit was that I got to make a piece of glass art too!   

I decided to make an underwater scene of some dancing Septopi.

So first, I created a background.

Then I painted on the front and back of the top piece...

Then, Wham!  After some collaboration with Susan, Amber, and Jeff we had a Glass Septopi sandwich.