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Zucchini (or courgettes as they call them here in merry England) are abundant this time of year. These vegetables are easy to go grow and can get HUGE if not picked early.

Word to wise shoppers: the smaller, younger zucchini have more flavor. Look for firm, heavy zucchini with bright glossy skin.

If you’re trying to cut down on calories, zucchini is a great food to add to your veggie table. They have a high water content (>95%) and so are very low in calories. Zucchini is also a source of folate, potassium, and vitamins A and C.

What to do with all this zucchini? eattheseasons has a sad-but-true observation:

In cafés and simple restaurants across the UK, courgettes are frequently (mis)used to make a poor excuse of a ratatouille or the sort of unappetizing vegetable ‘lasagne’ only ever eaten by desperate vegetarians with no other menu choice.

It’s so true (same can be said of risotto and goat’s cheese, the two other mainstays of vegetarian dining in Britain). But zucchini doesn’t have to be boring. Here are a few tasty ideas for tackling the zucchini glut:

Stuff em

Take a zucchini, scoop out the seeds, stuff with your favorite ingredients, and bake it til it’s done. Easy.

Need some stuffing ideas? Check out the urban vegan’s 50 ways to stuff zucchini.

Steam em’

On it’s own, steamed zucchini is a little bland. But you can liven them up with some herbs and spices. Take care not to steam too long or else they become a soggy mess!

• Steamed Zucchini with garlic and olive oil
• Sesame Steamed Zucchini

Make soup

• Bryanna’s Delicious Zucchini Bisque
• Sunny Summer Squash Soup
• Curried Zucchini Soup

Stir fry

Stir-fried zucchini makes a quick, easy accompaniment to any meal.

Image: zucchini, bell pepper and corn stir-fried with olive oil, cumin seeds, salt and pepper. Served with enchiladas and black beans - yum!

Grate

Simple but delicious pasta dish: grate zucchini and stir fry with garlic and olive oil. Toss with pasta and top with parmesan cheese. SO good.

Grated zucchini is also delicious raw with salads.

Grill

Zucchini’s a great on the grill. All you need is salt, pepper and a healthy dose of olive oil. I like a sprinkle of cumin seeds, as well - very good with Mexican food.

• Grilled Zucchini with garlic, oregano and rosemary
• Grilled Zucchini with lemon, chili, basil and mint
• Easy Grilled Zucchini

with Italian salad dressing

Make fritters

• Zucchini Fritters at limes & lycopene
• Courgette Fritters with Tomato and Feta Salsa
• Zucchini Patties
• Zucchini Corn Fritters
• Courgette and Potato Cakes with Mint and Feta

Eat them raw

I already mentioned grated zucchini over a salad. Here’s a couple other ideas:

• Stuffed courgette rolls
• Courgette salad

Marinate

Marinating zucchini in lemon juice gives it a lightly-cooked, al dente texture.

Marinated courgette salad with pine nuts & parmesan

Make Lasagna

I suspect you could make a no-pasta lasagna with strips of zucchini “noodles” instead of lasagna. But that wouldn’t be lasagna, would it? Why not a tasty tray of the real thing?

Creamy courgette lasagna

Bake it

• Courgette Tomato and Gruyre Gratin
• Zucchini Parmesan
• Sesame Parmesan Zucchini
• Baked Zucchini with Tomatoes
• Baked Zucchini Chips
• Nat’s Oven Baked Zucchini Chips

Ratatouille

No, not the Pixar movie. This Provencal stew is a delicious way to enjoy this season’s zucchini, eggplant, green peppers and tomato.

Delia’s Ratatouille

Don’t forget about zucchini bread

Or CAKE for that matter!

• Heidi’s “Special” Zucchini Bread
• Mom’s Zucchini Bread
• Chocolate zucchini cupcakes
• Chocolate & zucchini cake

Your turn: what do you do with zucchini? Post your ideas and recipes in the comments!

We all know that protein is important, especially for active folks trying to put on a little muscle. For vegetarians like me, this is a little tricky - many of the foods we eat don’t contain complete proteins. That is, beans and whole grains may contain lots of amino acids, but on their own, they don’t contain enough of the right amino acids to form a complete protein (you can read more about this in Nutrition by The American Dietetic Association). As a result, I usually try to balance my meals with grains and beans so I’m sure to maximize the protein punch!

Most recently, I’ve been doing this with pasta. There’s no meal like a pasta meal that cries CARB FEST. But you can easily turn pasta into a more well-rounded meal by simply adding a few beans. Pasta is actually high in the amino acids methionine and cysteine, but low in lysine. Legumes such as kidney beans, however, are low in methionine and cysteine, but high in lysine. Put the two together and you get a complete protein. Science!

Adding beans to pasta is as easy as, well, simply adding beans to pasta. Beans compliment most sauces just as well as pasta, but some combinations work better than others. Here are my preferences:

• Chickpeas or kidney beans with tomato sauce
• White beans or chickpeas with pesto sauce
• White beans or broad beans with garlic and olive oil

I’m not even going to touch alfredo (some foods you just shouldn’t mess with).

Here’s the recipe for the meal I had this evening (pictured above - it inspired me to write this post). Pesto linguine with chickpeas and arugula. YUM! I served this with a tomato, cucumber and red onion salad with balsamic vinaigrette. Bliss, I tell you. Pure comfort.

I don’t usually make desserts, so this season’s blackberry glut has been a challenge for me. I’m not a fan of sugary-sweet “treats”, and blackberries require a fair bit of sugar to bring out their flavor. I’m also suspicious of most dessert recipes, which often taste too sweet for my liking. Is this an American thing? Has our reliance on corn syrup acted as a kind of “sugar heroine”, forcing us to use even more sugar in our recipes to obtain the intended effect? Case in point: I recently made a rhubarb pie from a recipe at allrecipes.com. The recipe came with 4.5 stars and loads of great reviews, but my friends and I in London all agreed with the result: it was so sugary that we couldn’t even taste the rhubarb. Such a shame! I definitely don’t want my blackberries to share the same fate.

That’s when I came across this recipe for Blackberry Slump, what BBC Food calls “an American version of a blackberry cobbler”. I’m not exactly sure what makes this an “American version”, because it isn’t made with the usual flour-based cobbler top. Instead, the pastry is made with polenta, a very coarse corn meal, and toasted hazelnuts, both of which give the cobbler a wonderful texture. Think cornbread soaked up with sweet delicious berry juice.

And what about those berries? Guess what - not too sweet! This recipe uses mainly peaches and their juice to sweeten the blackberries. The fruits compliment each other well without turning into one contiguous mass of fruit mush - both the peaches and the blackberries retained their unique delicious flavors. I cooked these as individual portions in my new little ramekins. They freeze well this way and can be easily reheated in the oven.

The only thing I change from the original recipe is the ratio of cobbler to fruit. The BBC Recipe results in a one-to-one cobbler to fruit ratio. I prefer more fruit, so am providing the recipe here with only half the cobbler topping. Of course, you could always double the fruit instead and have plenty of leftovers for later. =)

The ultimate way to eat this dessert is with vanilla ice cream. Mmm. Vegans in the audience, I’d be curious to know how a vegan cobbler top would work, replacing the butter with oil and the milk with soy milk. Any takers?

I’m not 100% vegan, though the more I learn, the more I think that it may be the life for me. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with vegan desserts. I want to make yummy animal-free desserts made of whole food that’s as good to eat as it is to think. No funny stuff like food coloring or margarine or additives (to me this defeats part of the purpose of going vegan). No, I want to understand all of the ingredients I put in my desserts.

My first attempt at a vegan pumpkin pie was a bit of a failure, and my most recent attempt at a lemon-blackberry tart received mixed reviews. Despite all this, one recipe has been loved by all: the oat-nut crust from the Whole Food Bible.

This crust is like an oatmeal cookie in crust form. It smells delicious and tastes good by itself (this is a good thing, especially if what you put in the crust doesn’t turn out as yummy as you had hoped!).

Vegan Oat-Nut Pie Crust

Makes one 9-inch pie crust

1/2 cup whole almonds
1/2 cup whole walnuts or pecans
1 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
Pinch of sea salt
3 Tbsp canola oil
3 Tbsp maple syrup
1 Tbsp vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 350 F / 180 C.
2. Bake the almonds and walnuts or pecans on separate baking sheets until they are fragrant and toasted: about 8 minutes for pecans or walnuts, 10 minutes for almonds. Remove from oven and set aside to cool. Raise the oven temperature to 375 F / 190 C.
3. Grind the oats in a blender or food processor until they become coarse meal. Empty into a large mixing bowl.
4. Grind the almonds and walnuts or pecans into a coarse meal and add to the oats, along with the flour and salt.
5. In a small bowl, whip together the oil, maple syrup, and vanilla. Add to the oat-nut mixture and mix well. Allow the mixture to sit for 10 minutes in the refrigerator.
6. With cold, wet hands, press the crust mixture into a well-oiled tart or pie pan. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes, or until golden brown.

Chapatis are an Indian flatbread, much like a flour tortilla, and are typically eaten with dal and curries. As these are two of my favorite foods, I’ve been pretty keen to learn how to make chapatis on my own. Plus, they’re a pretty good substitute for flour tortillas. Tacos here I come!

So far, my experiments with home-cooked chapatis have been average at best. I don’t have a gas stove OR a cast iron skillet - two kitchen tools that are pretty darn helpful in firing up a surface HOT enough to cook the chapatis on. Instead, I’ve been using an electric stove and a non-stick pan. The chapatis are certainly edible enough, but I can never get them to puff up to the pillow-like proportions that the recipes describe.

Today I learned a trick from Mark Bittman: use the grill! Mark Bittman has a recipe and video that demonstrates how to cook chapatis on an outdoor grill. For lack of an outdoor grill, I decided to try it for myself using the stove’s grill setting (equivalent to a broiler), and turning the heat up as high as it goes. It worked marvelously! It was so exciting watching them puff up in the oven. They looked just like Mark’s and tasted fab with my lentil dal.

Grilled Chapatis Recipe
Grilled Chapatis Viedo

The New York Times is running a series of delicious-sounding recipes that feature one of my favorite foods - beans! All are either vegetarian or vegan and sound stupidly easy to make.

• Mediterranean Chickpea Salad
• Summer Pasta with Tomatoes and Chickpeas
• Soft Black Bean Tacos
• Summer Minestrone With Fresh Basil

The NYT also has a recipe for Clear Summer Borscht that I’ve been meaning to try. So much food, so little room in my stomach. Sigh!

If you don’t read MizFit, then now is the time to start. Today she has graciously allowed me to be Guest Chef on her site! Check it out for my tasty Indian Lentil Dal recipe, not to mention the loads of other tasty articles that MizFit has written. Hope to see you there!

Last May I featured Manjula’s Spinach Paratha recipe on the vegetarian carnival. Spinach parathas are an Indian flatbread stuffed with a spicy spinach filling. I finally had the opportunity to make these tonight and already I can’t wait to make them again. These tortilla-like parathas were surprisingly easy to make and I loved the cumin-spiked spinach. My only complaint is that I couldn’t get mine to puff up the way hers did in the video. This I blame on my lack of a cast iron skillet. I tried making a couple under the grill in the oven and they turned out more like pizza bases, but I still enjoyed them (this I did after putting out the fire that the grill set on some old cheese grease that was left in a pan - whoops).

After cooking the parathas, I put them in some foil and kept them warm in the oven. This had a bonus effect of softening the bread making them easier to fold up and wrap with yummy things like lentil dal with panch phoran. For you protein junkies, do you know what you get when combine the leguminous lentil with the whole wheat paratha? That’s right: a complete protein. Feast on that!

Manjula recommends serving parathas with yogurt and pickles, or filling them with cheese! Yum. Just like a quesedilla. Just don’t set fire to the grease.

For more paratha goodness, check out lolo’s Aloo Parathas at VeganYumYum!

Spinach Paratha [Manjula’s Kitchen]
Aloo Parathas [VeganYumYum]

If you’ve ever wanted to bake bread but were always too chicken to try, then please visit Jim Lahey’s article and give No Knead Bread a whirl. I’ve been baking bread this way for months and I swear it’s the best thing ever. Why? Because fresh homemade bread is like sliceable heaven. There is a certain beauty in its simplicity: water, salt, yeast and flour. That’s all it takes! This is whole, natural food, folks. No preservatives needed. All that hippy stuff aside, what really gets me baking are the flavor and the time. Jim Lahey’s recipe turns out a seriously delicious loaf of bread, and because there’s no kneading involved, it’s super quick to throw together (aside from the 18-hour rise time!).

I’ve made dozens of no knead bread loaves, and with each new attempt I usually try something new such as added seeds or different flour (I highly recommend Dove’s Organic Strong Wholemeal Flour). Last week I was feeling ambitious and went for a variation of the Seeded Sour loaf posted on Breadtopia.com. The loaf contains quinoa, millet, amaranth and poppy seeds, plus a bonus seed coating on the outside. I didn’t have sourdough starter so I used yeast. The resulting loaf had a nice texture and I discovered how much I love poppy seeds. The only think I’d skip next time is the amaranth in the seed topping - it was a little crunchy for my tastes. Otherwise, the seed topping is awesome and I think I’ll use it for all of my loaves because it makes it easy to get the dough out of the bowl.

To make sense of what I’m talking about, visit Breadtopia and check out their recipe and video. I highly recommend watching the video; I learned so much just by watching the baker handle the dough and manage the seeds. It also gave me extreme baker envy as he had all these useful tools like a dough scraper and a “proofing” bowl. The same page also contains three other no knead variations that might suit your fancy.

Tempting Textures: Quinoa, Amaranth, Poppy and Millet

Four-Seed No Knead Bread

30 grams rye flour
70 grams strong whole wheat bread flour
370 grams strong bread flour
1 1/2 tsp. salt
3 1/2 tsp. quinoa
3 1/2 tsp. millet
2 Tbs. amaranth
1/2 Tbs. poppy seeds
1/4 tsp. yeast
350ml water
2 Tbs. yogurt

Seed Topping Ingredients:

1/4 cup sesame seeds
1 1/2 Tbs poppy seeds

Combine all dry ingredients (except the topping ingredients) and mix with the combined wet ingredients. Stir until the dough has the consistency of a shaggy ball, adding more water if necessary. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Let the dough rest in a warm place for at least 12 hours (and up to 24 hours. The dough is ready when it’s about double in size and spotted with big bubbles.

Give the counter top and your hands a generous sprinkle of flour. Turn the dough onto the counter. Pull the dough at either end to form a strip. Fold this strip into thirds (like a business letter). Give the dough a quarter turn and fold in thirds again. I’ll refer to these folds as “seams”, i.e., “right now your dough is on the counter, seam side up.” Cover with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

Oil a large bowl with olive oil. Add the seed topping ingredients in the bowl and swish the bowl around until the inside is covered in seeds. Put the dough ball into the bowl seam side down. Cover with the plastic wrap and let sit for 2-3 hours. The dough is ready when it has more than doubled in size.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When the dough is ready, remove the HOT pot and pour in a bit of olive oil. Swirl it around so that oil covers the entire inside of the pot. Now, take the bowl containing the dough and quickly turn it upside down over the pot so that the dough falls in seam side up. Cover the pot with a lid and bake for 40 minutes. Then remove the lid and bake another 5 or so minutes, until the loaf is browned and the seeds are toasted. Cool on a rack at least 45 minutes before slicing.

No Knead Recipe Variations
No knead Bread - Jim Lahey’s original recipe

You may already know that I’m bonkers for Bircher muesli. This week, I continue to spread the word over at Diets In Review. Check out the post for a little history lesson and a tasty recipe.

Here’s a snip:

In 1900, Bircher invented the now famous “muesli cereal”. His original recipe is vastly different from the sugar-coated, toasted muesli we typically find in the grocery store today. Instead, Bircher combined soaked oats, fruit and nuts with grated apple and lemon juice to create a naturally sweet breakfast cereal designed to energize and heal the body.

For any raw foodies in the audience, be aware that rolled oats aren’t raw (they are usually steamed before packaging). However, you can sub sprouted buckwheat or whole oat groats for a totally raw breakfast treat.

Read on for the recipe…

Veggie Breakfast Bircher Muesli [Diets in Review]