Creative Ways to Eat Zucchini

Does anyone ever lack zucchini during the fall harvest season? This year we decided to expand our repertoire from our standard zucchini bread and zucchini chowder, and we have tried out several different dishes. Most of these are thanks to The Classic Zucchini Cookbook, which I borrowed from the library. For these recipes, I always grated the zucchini instead of slicing or dicing because I found my children ate it better--they don't always like the texture of the larger slices.






The first recipe I tried out was Ground Beef and Zucchini Italian Casserole. I forgot to take a photo of the final product before we ate it all. I made this one night when we had a lot of interruptions (phone ringing, mouse customers stopping by, 2-year-old screaming, just to mention a few), and we didn't sit down to eat until 7:30 p.m. I think the reason the children loved it was because they were so hungry they didn't care what they ate.






We next present Summer Squash Enchiladas. I used less fresh peppers because I didn't want to make it too spicy for the children. However, both Kevin and I thought it could have used the full amount. We also thought it could have used more cheese. Child assessment: Erin ate only the tortillas and scraped away the insides. Ian picked out all the tomatoes, but he liked the enchiladas better than Megan. None of the children asked for seconds.

The Zucchini Quiche we ate last night received a much higher rating from Megan. I changed the recipe a bit to make it more palatable (and therefore more unhealthy), but it was a hit. I added some crumbled bacon, used colby-jack cheese, and only used 1 C. of milk. I further cheated by enlisting the help of Marie Callender in providing a premade pie crust which happened to be in our freezer. It also took 30 minutes longer to bake than the recipe said, so once again we ate a late dinner.











For our FHE treat, we ate Squice Cake, which we had already made before for Ian's cake contest, and we already knew it was delicious. We thank Janell for providing this lovely photo because we were too lazy (and full of zucchini products) to take our own.









I am not sure we successfully linked the recipes to this post, so let me know if other users can access them (although by this point in time you are all probably sick of zucchini, plus your plants have probably frozen).