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| Day 7, a week late. Oops. I’m a bad, bad blogger. Well, the meal was made on day seven, however the picture didn’t make it off the camera until today. Yeah. Anyway, in all of its glory, I present to you my own creation, a zucchini pasta salad. The idea took form after I realized I could make pasta noodles from zucchini using my mandoline. Since I heavily modify recipes anyway, I’m just going to give you the basics of what I did. Onions were browned in some olive oil, then the tomatoes were added along with the zucchini and a bit of homebrewed beer. While that was simmering, I grilled the chicken and portobello mushrooms. The mix on the stove went into the fridge after the liquid was drained and so did the finished chicken and mushrooms. After everything was well chilled, I brought it out, sliced the chicken and mushrooms, added some local blue cheese on top and finished it off with a blackberry vinegarette (Olive oil, crushed blackberries, red wine vinegar, fresh basil). All the flavors worked well together and it made for a light afternoon lunch. | Zucchini Pasta Salad – My Own Recipe |
| Ingredients Used: *Zucchini – my garden *Tomatoes – Charlestown Farm *Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms *Cheese – Birchrun Hills Farm *Chicken – Eberly Poultry *Onion – North Star Orchard *Blackberries – Willow Creek |
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Tag: zucchini week
Zucchini Week: Day 6
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| All this zucchini and today is day six. One more to go! Today I tried a big experiment – Zucchini Pickles. I’ve never made pickles and have never canned or preserved anything in jars before, so this was all new territory for me. I actually used a recipe and advice from the Ball Canning Book, but the PickYourOwn.org website had pretty much the same recipe with onions added in, so that’s what I’m sharing with you. The recipe used up three mega-zucchini and filled seven wide-mouth pint jars. The process was much easier than I thought it would be, but does require some odd canning-specific equipment that the average cook won’t have around the house. The pickling solution smelled really good, but I haven’t tried them yet. I think I’ll wait a week to let them soak up more of the pickling juices in the jars first! | Zucchini Pickles – Recipe on PickYourOwn.org |
| Ingredients Used: *Zucchini – my garden |
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Zucchini Week: Day 5
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| Day five of zucchini week already. I had other plans for today, but the crazy storms that rolled through right around dinner time spoiled the outdoor cooking idea, so I switched days up a little. Today was this neat polenta zucchini tart. I became a big fan of polenta the first time my study abroad Italian host mother made polenta lasagna. MMmmm Cornmeal. So, I’ve been searching for neat recipes that use polenta and came across this one. Sadly, the recipe didn’t include instructions on how to make polenta from scratch, so I borrowed Alton Brown’s savory polenta recipe with a few changes. The ingredients are ALL local this time (well okay, the olive oil isn’t, but who’s really counting that anyway). The feta cheese added something I think the parmesan wouldn’t quite do in the same way, plus, I didn’t have parmesan cheese on hand. This is absolutely delicious and will probably be made again as tomato season rolls around, using tomatoes in place of zucchini. | Zucchini Polenta Tart – Recipe on ChocolateandZucchini.com |
| Ingredients Used: *Zucchini – my garden *Cornmeal – Mill at Anselma *Feta – Amazing Acres *Onion – North Star Orchard *Garlic – Willow Creek |
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Zucchini Week: Day 4
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| We move into day four of Zucchini Week with a heavily modified version of our recipe. My mandoline didn’t have a plate that would slice wide but thin slices of zucchini for proper pappardelle noodles (think wide fettuccine), so i went with the square-spaghetti-sized slicer instead. This gave me these awesome zucchini spaghetti noodles and I was just in total awe. Why hadn’t I thought of this before! Ingenius. Michael Chiarello uses a whole bunch of spices and ingredients that I just didn’t have and was not going to go out and buy just for this recipe, so I improvised. A LOT. Sweet smoked Spanish paprika? Grey Salt?! Yeah. I had regular old paprika and table salt, and those worked out just fine. Instead of arugula, I happened to have some red leaf lettuce in the fridge and went with that. The feta is a goat’s milk feta that I’ve been layering on sandwiches all week. I still had two heirloom tomatoes from last week’s farmer’s market run and used those in place of the cherry tomatoes, sliced thin. I didn’t have olives, so they didn’t make it into this dish. Overall though, I think this worked out well and the idea of the recipe is still there. The warm tomatoes and zucchini noodles over lettuce made for a really great, refreshing and light lunch. | Zucchini Pappardelle Salad – Recipe on FoodNetwork.com |
| Ingredients Used: *Zucchini – my garden *Lettuce – Kimberton Whole Foods locally grown *Tomatoes – North Star Orchard *Feta – Amazing Acres |
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Zucchini Week: Day 3
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| Day three! Are you sick of zucchini yet? I’m not! In fact, it’s pretty fun using up zucchini left and right in all these different recipes with the whole meal coming out pretty different every time. Today was a Zucchini Breakfast Casserole, another recipe from Elise’s vast collection. This is the last one from her for the week, I promise! I’ve come to love casseroles because they’re just so easy – put all the ingredients in one dish, bake, refrigerate leftovers to enjoy all week. And, I’m willing to bet that this is just as good the next day as it is fresh. I used a fresh goat’s milk ricotta cheese, basil from my back deck herb planter, and substituted fresh heriloom tomatoes from the farmer’s market. The bread was a “rustic wheat” that was really delicious in sandwiches, but I happened to have just one slice leftover for this recipe. I also added a lump of that spicy chipotle chevre again. There aren’t a lot of ingredients in this one, but the simplicity is what makes it so attractive and delicious. It’s easy and quick to make and goes a long way. | Zucchini Breakfast Casserole – Recipe on SimplyRecipes.com |
| Ingredients Used: *Zucchini – my garden *Basil – my herb garden *Egg – Mt. View Organics *Tomatoes – North Star Orchard *Cheese – Shellbark Hollow Farms *Bread – Oley Baker *Chevre – Amazing Acres |
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Zucchini Week: Day 2
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| Day two of zucchini week brings us to Stuffed Zucchini. As usual, I used the recipe as a guideline and substituted a few things using ingredients found locally. For the ground turkey, I used hot italian turkey sausage. Instead of Parmesan Cheese, I threw in Sharp II Chevre. Tomatoes were both from a local source and even last year’s garden in the form of sun-dried roma tomatoes. Mushrooms are also local mushrooms of the Crimini variety, bought from my favorite farmer’s market. The zucchini used here is a monster zucchini, probably a little past its prime, and a result of a neglectful gardener who didn’t want to go out picking through her garden during the heat, humidity, and thunderstorms we’ve been having lately. However, those three things have given me quite the harvest, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much. Now if only I could find a way to combine both zucchini and cucumbers into one dish! | Stuffed Zucchini – Recipe on SimplyRecipes.com |
| Ingredients Used: *Zucchini – my garden *Basil – my herb garden *Egg – Mt. View Organics *Sausage – Mt. View Organics *Onion – North Star Orchard *Tomatoes – North Star Orchard *Cheese – Shellbark Hollow Farms *Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms |
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Zucchini Week: Day 1
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| For day one of zucchini week, I decided to try something new and different. I just love Elise’s website for recipes and this one jumped right out at me as being something relatively easy and delicious and above all, different from the normal uses for zucchini. The Zucchini Fritters were all of those things and this is definitely going see many repeat performances! I switched out the scallions for a locally grown onion, and used goat’s milk yogurt and cheese, both from local farms. The cheese in little lumps at the back of the plate is a spicy chipotle chevre and since I like a bit of tabasco sauce with anything involving egg, this pleased my palate to no end. This may not be a whole meal, but it’s a great use for at least one of those zucchini! | Zucchini Fritters – Recipe on SimplyRecipes.com |
| Ingredients Used: *Zucchini – my own garden *Egg – Mt. View Organics *Onion – North Star Orchard *Flour – Mill at Anselma *Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farms *Cheese – Amazing Acres |
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