Zucchini, Two Ways

One of the best aspects of culinary bricolage style cooking is that you get to craft meals based on what you have available. It's like being on one of those cooking shows where you have to make something with the ingredients you are given. This is awesome for many reasons. It helps to cut back on food waste because instead of seeking out ingredients to use, you use up what you have around you. It works great with receiving a weekly CSA, as I have learned. I look forward to planning meals around the veggies I get each week. Also, it takes the pressure off because instead of coming up with meals out of thin air you have something to work with.

And right now, I have a lot of zucchini to work with. My parent's garden is overflowing with the green beauties.

It is easy to stir-fry or grill zucchini and it will always be yummy. But I have a couple of other ideas I would like to offer: Baked zucchini napoleon and zucchini bread.

BAKED ZUCCHINI NAPOLEON
I love stacking things on each other as a way of making creative meals. I guess this style is called napoleon in the cooking world, which refers to a specific kind of dessert (as described here) but can apply to whatever ingredients you choose to use. For this meal I had lots of zucchini to work with, as well as eggplant and tomato from my CSA and some random cheeses. Here is what I did.

I sliced the zucchini, tomato and eggplant into uniform pieces for stacking on top of each other. I oiled a large glass baking dish and began building each stack. Here is the order:

• A slice of zucchini
• A layer of garlic 
• A layer of basil from the garden
• A layer of cheddar cheese 
• A slice of eggplant
• A slice of tomato
• A layer of mozzarella cheese
• Another layer of zucchini
• A layer of parmesan cheese
• More garlic
• Balsamic vinegar drizzled over the whole thing

Here is what it looked like before going into the oven (at 350 degrees):

It baked for about 30 minutes and the cheese got nice and melty. I thought the melty cheese would hold it all together, but sadly the stacks began to tip over a bit. Oh well, it was still delicious!

ZUCCHINI BREAD

I don't know about you, but I love zucchini bread! The grated zucchini makes the bread super moist and yummy. I just googled recipes and ended up using this one.

I exercised some creative license to use dark chocolate morsels instead of nuts. Overall, it came out pretty great! And I was able to use up a big zucchini in the process. Success!