Summer is zucchini season! It seems like it’s everywhere… in the garden, at the farmers’ market, on your front porch. (If you have friendly neighbors!) In this 1996 episode, Arlene is here with some delicious recipes for zucchini pasta, zucchini stuffed chicken, and zucchini cake. Yummy!
Zucchini Stuffed Chicken
Ingredients
- 3 Tbsp butter
- 1/2 small onion
- 1 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley
- 1/2 tsp dried basil
- 2 medium Zucchini, shredded (about 2-1/2 cups)
- 3 slices white bread, torn into coarse crumbs
- 1 egg beaten
- 3/4 cup shredded Swiss cheese
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/8 tsp pepper
- 4 chicken breast halves (with bones and skin)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
- In a skillet, melt butter over medium-high heat. Saute onion, parsley, and basil until onion is tender. Add zucchini and continue to cook for 2 minutes. Remove from heat; stir in bread crumbs, egg, cheese, salt and pepper.
- Carefully loosen the skin of the chicken on one side to form a pocket. Stuff each breast with zucchini mixture. Bake in preheated oven for 50 to 60 minutes or until chicken is done. Makes 4 servings. Enjoy!
Fettucine Toss-Up
Ingredients
- 2 cups fresh mushrooms, thinly sliced
- 2 cloves garlic, peeled
- 1/2 cup butter, melted
- 1 lb zucchini, cut into julienne strips
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 1 lb fettuccine, cooked, well drained
- 1 cup grated Romano cheese
- Salt and pepper
- 3/4 cup diced cooked chicken or ham or crisp bacon
Instructions
- Saute mushrooms and garlic in melted butter for 2 to 3 minutes. Remove garlic and discard. Add zucchini and cream and simmer for 5 minutes.
- Combine hot fettucine, parsley, cheese, salt and pepper in a serving bowl. Toss well. Add the mushroom-zucchini-cream mixture. Toss again. If desired, meat may be added now. Makes 6 to 8 servings. Enjoy!
Arlene’s Zucchini Cake
Ingredients
- 3 eggs
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 cup vegetable oil
- 2 cups grated zucchini
- 3 tsp vanilla
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp nutmeg
- 3 cups flour
- 1 cup walnuts
- 1 cup raisins
Cream Cheese Icing
- 2 pkgs cream cheese, softened (8 oz, each)
- 1 tsp grated lemon zest
- 2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
- 1/4 cup butter, softened
- 1 tsp vanilla
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 13×9 inch or Bundt pan thoroughly.
- In a mixing bowl, combine eggs, sugar, oil and, using an electric mixer, blend well. Add zucchini and vanilla and continue to mix.
- In a separate bowl, combine baking soda, cinnamon, baking powder, nutmeg and flour. Mix to blend. Add walnuts and raisins and mix to cover.
- Add flour mixture to eggs mixture and blend well. Pour into prepared pan. Bake for 1 hour or until toothpick tests clean. Cool on wire rack for 15 minutes, then remove from pan and allow to cool completely. Ice or glaze, if desired. Makes 15 servings. Enjoy!
Cream Cheese Icing
- In a bowl, using an electric mixer at medium speed, beat cream cheese and butter until smooth. Add vanilla and lemon zest; beat until well combined. Reduce speed to low. Beat in powdered sugar until smooth. Makes enough frosting for one large cake. Enjoy!
Transcript
- Hello and welcome to “At Home” today. I hope that your day is going just great. I hope that things that you have worried about or been concerned about, I hope that finally you’re letting them go and realizing that God is able to take care of them and help you through them. I really hope you’re doing that. I hope that you will stop and just reflect on how good God has really been. So everything isn’t perfect in your life, it’s okay because some of the positive things that are happening you probably never thought would happen. And the things that are weighing you down and like really putting you into a tizzy, don’t worry about it. This too will pass. My dad used to preach a sermon that said, “It came to pass, it didn’t come to stay.” All right? So, today, just let it go, and it’s gonna get better. Tomorrow will be a better day. Today on “At Home”, we’re gonna be making a lot of dishes with this little fella. This, my friend, is a zucchini. and I’m sure that if you have grown these throughout the summer, you know what this baby is because you’ve probably said at least 15 times, “Hey, would you like some zucchini? Hey, would you like some zucchini?” To the neighbors, to your friends, to your family because these babies like to grow. I think the biggest one I ever saw, this zucchini, oh, it looked like a torpedo. It probably was at least 20 to 22 inches long and about that big around. And I thought, why would anybody let one get that big because what can you do with it? I mean, someone said they had one that was… They had been given a zucchini so large that they ate four meals off of it and still had some leftover. I think that’s too big. I like them when they’re young and tender and they’re not so old on the vine. And we’re gonna make a lot of things today with that. We’re gonna make a chicken dish, we’re gonna make a pasta dish, and even a dessert using this guy right here, the zucchini. We’ll be right back in just a minute but here’s today’s “At Home” hint. Here’s today’s “At Home” hint. When using zucchini for breads or cakes, there’s no need to peel the vegetable. Simply wash it thoroughly and trim the ends off. Shred as usual. The green peel adds a lot of flavor to your fresh baked goods. If you’ve got a helpful hint you’d like to share with us, we want to hear from you. Send your hint to At Home Hints, CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. Well, the first dish that we’re gonna prepare today is called zucchini stuffed chicken. And what you need to do is just shred the zucchini, you know on the shredder like you do your cabbage for coleslaw, use that and you’re gonna shred it up real fine like this. And first of all, we’re gonna take a couple of tablespoons, three tablespoons of butter, put them in our skillet, get it good and hot. To that we’re gonna add our onion, which is a half of a small onion chopped, all right. If you like more, put more in, but that’s about enough right there. This is enough stuffing or filling to do four chicken breasts. So you wanna keep that in mind if you’re gonna do more then you’d adjust it to more. And this is gonna cook. Get your skillet really nice and hot so it cooks up as soon as it hits it. Now, we’re gonna add some parsley, which is a tablespoon of fresh parsley. Just put that right there. And some fresh chopped basil or half a teaspoon of dried if you have dried. We’re using fresh today because a lot of this stuff is convenient for us now because this time of the year we have all of these good, good ingredients and vegetables to use. All right, now, medium high heat, we’re gonna saute this. I think the onion looks like it’s tender. Now, we’re gonna add our zucchini, which is about 2 1/2 cups. We’re gonna add that right in there. All right, don’t peel the zucchini first. Don’t do that because that green is gonna add so much color to it and it looks so nice. We’re only gonna cook this about two minutes here, that’s what the recipe calls for, about two minutes over the high heat that we started with, just like this. And what this does is just kind of soften down the zucchini a little bit, and marries the flavors of the onion and, of course, the basil and the parsley. All right, about two minutes, let that cook. And what you’re gonna have prepared to put this together, you’re gonna have a beaten egg, three the slices of bread, fresh bread, just cut it in cubes. And 3/4 of a cup of shredded Swiss cheese, and some salt and pepper. All right, I think we’re about there with our zucchini. Maybe if you’re cooking at home, you let this cook just a little bit longer, but for time’s sake, we’re gonna say it’s done. It’s gonna bake in the oven so it’s not gonna matter. All right, and I’m going to put this here because I wanna combine all my other ingredients with it. Smell is wonderful. I like zucchini because it’s versatile. Now, usually like if say a tomato, you can’t make a dessert with a tomato, not usually but the zucchini can go from an appetizer to a main course to a vegetable, to a bread, to a dessert. So that’s why I like it because it is so versatile. All right, now we’re gonna add, after we’ve done that, we’re gonna add our bread crumbs and our beaten egg, the cheese. and some salt, little salt, and some pepper. Okay, to your liking, if you like more, put more, okay? Now, what we’ll do… Clean up here a little bit so we have some room. You’ll want to get your chicken breasts. Now, these are not the ones that you normally… Everybody seems to be using boneless, skinless chicken breasts, these are the chicken breasts that have the skin and the bones, they’re still on the skin and bones. I guess you could use that, but I think it would be a little bit dry. So I probably would not use the boneless, skinless ones. And sometimes everybody’s using it for everything, the boneless chicken breasts, it’s kinda nice to go back to the ones with the bones in it. And all you’re gonna do here on these chicken breasts is you’re gonna lift the skin. Now, here’s one. We’re gonna lift this skin and make a pocket right here. Just put your fingers, get your thumb up underneath there and lift it. Don’t tear it off, just lift it. And then you’ll spoon some of this filling right inside that chicken breast, just like that. That’s got cheese, that’s got the bread cubes, oh, I think it’s gonna be delicious. And then you’ll put this in your baking dish. And again, we’ll do another. You have to be sure that you get your finger between that real fine, thin skin, and you might have to just keep forcing it to get… There we are. To get it in there, but persevere, it will work. And you almost wanna make like a pouch. Don’t worry about closing it with any kind of toothpicks, you don’t need to do that. It will stay there ’cause you’re not gonna turn these over in the oven, they’ll be roasting upright. Now, you want to be sure to have your oven preheated and preheat it to 375 degrees. And what that will do is get good, hot heat going with your chicken and it will definitely cook the filling and the chicken quickly. This should go, I would say, about 50 to 60 minutes. I think you need to check it. If you have smaller… These are kind of large chicken breasts, but if you have smaller breasts, it would not take as long. So we’ll do the last one. You can see we have a little extra filling left over, that’s okay. You never know until you do it to see how much you’re going to need. There we are, just like that. Now what I would do with this… Get rid of these. What I would do with this now is just sprinkle the outside with just a bit of salt lightly, just like that, and a bit of pepper ’cause I think that that will crisp up the skin and that also makes a nice presentation when you bring it to the table. This will not have any kind of a gravy to it so you want that skin to crisp up and look nicely. Now, let’s put this in our oven. Again, I said about 50 to 60 minutes. And you know how to test for your chicken? You just cut near the bone to make sure that there is no pink there, no blood running, and you know that it’s ready. All right, now we’re gonna do one of those dishes I said that I like because the zucchini is so versatile, we’re gonna work on a cake, a zucchini cake. And it’s very easy. You don’t even have to use the mixer, which is what I like. You have to have a nice big bowl though, it’s really important. First of a all, we’re gonna take three eggs and we’re going to just break the yolks up in those, just like that. Next, that’s it, stir them around a little bit. Now, we’re going to add some sugar, which is two cups of sugar, this makes a large cake. There we go. Two cups of sugar and a cup of oil. This is just your vegetable oil. Don’t use a heavy oil like olive oil, too heavy. Use something lighter like a vegetable oil. I don’t even think I would use corn oil because it changes the flavor when it’s predominantly corn, it changes the flavor definitely. All right, so we’re just mixing this around. This is eggs, sugar, and oil. Just like that. All right, and then, now we’re gonna add some zucchini, which is two cups of grated zucchini, put that in. And our vanilla, which is three teaspoons. It’s a lot of vanilla, but you need that to bring that flavor up. All right, and now we’re gonna mix, just like this. This is really an easy, easy cake to do. And I like these because these freeze well. We’re gonna put cream cheese icing on it. It’s really gonna be good, I think you’re gonna like it. All right, now, we set this aside and we use our flour because now we’re gonna add baking soda, a teaspoon of baking soda, two teaspoons of cinnamon, half a teaspoon of baking powder, half a teaspoon of nutmeg, and we add our walnuts and our raisins. And I didn’t chop the walnuts because I feel like I just like the looks of those nice big walnuts in there, and if somebody doesn’t like them, they can take them out. And basically, all you’re gonna do, we cover the walnuts and the raisins with the flour because then they don’t settle to the bottom of the cake. And so now that we have those incorporated, mixed well together, now we’re gonna add that to the zucchini mixture. And you can make this either in bread pans, two nice, nine by five bread pans, or in a bun pan, but it has to be a large bun pan, can’t be a little bun pan. And basically, all you do here is just blend this. That’s all you do until you get a nice, smooth batter where you see no more flour. And we’re gonna put that in our greased cake pan. And this bakes at 350 degrees so have your oven good and hot, really important to have that hot first. And it will bake for about 1 hour and 15 minutes. The best way when it comes to a cake that’s dense, and this is a dense cake, a thick cake. And if you’re putting it into a cake pan that is this heavy or this thick, it’s really important that when you go to take it out, don’t just rely on the recipe, you have to take a toothpick and make sure that you indeed have baked it long enough so it does not fall, okay? All right, we’re gonna put this in the pan and while we’re doing that, we’ll take a break and we’ll be right back to make some icing and another wonderful meal using zucchini. We’ll be right back. The next dish that we’ll be making is called fettuccine toss up. And for the lack of a better name, I guess, that’s okay. But this basically what we’ve done is put a half a cup of melted butter, we have it in our skillet, and two cups of fresh mushrooms thinly sliced, and two cloves of garlic. See that garlic? And we have sauteed them for a while until they’re limp and they’re… Let’s gets a little higher heat going here, here we go. Now, what you do after you cook this together for two or three minutes and the cloves of garlic really have flavored the mushrooms and have flavored the butter, then what we do is remove them, which I think is kind of sad because you know why? I kinda liked the garlic in there, but I like that sometimes if you leave too much garlic in there, then that’s what everything tastes like is garlic. There’s other ingredients, but it tends to overpower. So we’ve removed it. Now, we’re getting this to come up to a… There it goes. So you can’t move on until it starts cooking. So I’m stalling here for a minute to get this going. Now, what we’ll do is take a pound of zucchini, and this has been cut in julienne strips. This is not peeled, but you see how thin these little strips are? There’s a reason. It cooks faster when it’s cut in little tiny strips like that. So this is about a pound, and we’re gonna add that to the mushrooms and the butter in our skillet. We already have our fettuccine cooking. It’s ready to go. And now we have to kind of let this stir-fry a little bit and because to this we are going to add a cup of heavy cream. Now, this is not low fat, but this is a cup of heavy cream, and you just pour that over the zucchini. This is gonna make a wonderful, wonderful sauce for your fettuccine. And tell you what, everybody’s mouth is watering already ’cause anytime you put cream in something like that, it has to be good, right? It’s like if you put a lot of butter in it, you think well, it has to be good. Well, this is cream. And this is gonna cook. We’re gonna let this simmer for about five minutes. Now, let me see, we have our fettuccine and I’m going to bring it over here. Need a large bowl. We have to get a bowl. The girls are washing, I’ll wait for a minute while they get the bowl. We need to combine all of this because once this cooks for five minutes, it’s gonna reduce, it’s gonna cook the zucchini, and it’s gonna taste incredible. I think this combination you’ll say, “Well, I’ve never really never have tasted cream and zucchini and mushrooms together.” Well, I think it’s a different flavor. If you’re kind of tired of always having the pasta with the red sauce or with a heavy tomato, maybe you don’t have the heavy tomato sauce, but you have tomatoes and onion and garlic in oil or something, this is a change of pace. This is something a little different. Thank you, Linda. And so while this simmers for five minutes, we’re gonna put our for fettuccine in a large bowl. You see you’d need a large bowl to do this. You just couldn’t use any bowl. And we’ll do the fettuccine. Okay, they booby trapped the fettuccine. Here we go. You know what happens when it sits for a while? It just kind of sticks to the bottom of the pan, but we got it out, we’re cool. All right, you know you never know with this crowd, I mean, life is a surprise for me. Every time I come to this studio to do these programs ’cause you never know what’s gonna happen. All right, this is the fettuccine and we’re gonna add some cheese and we need some parsley. We have to get some fresh parsley. Okay, this is one cup of grated Romano cheese. All right, we’re gonna put that on there. Okay, and this just seasons, flavors the fettuccine. All right, just like that. You can see here, look how beautiful this is going. This is supposed to cook about four or five minutes just till it reduces and thickens up a bit. All right, now you have an option with this. If you want to, you can either, for the meat in this recipe, it can either be cooked chicken, cooked ham, or crisp bacon. You need 3/4 of a cup of any of those. We chose to do the ham today because we thought that would be something different. That would be a nice combination with the zucchini and with the cream. We have about 3/4 cup of finely diced, finely diced ham, all right? And Linda’s giving me the parsley. Thank you, Linda. A little late on these ingredients today, but that’s okay. We’ve been working hard, okay? And now we have our parsley. And this is how much parsley. This is a few strips of parsley, we’ll say about a table spoon of fresh parsley if you have it ’cause that’s what’s gonna make it good. All right, now we have our ham in it. We’re ready to go now with our cream mixture and we’re just gonna pour that over top. Does this look good? Wow, it looks good. I think so too. Here we go. Now we pour the zucchini, the cream, and the mushrooms over the top. Does that look good? Mm-hmm, I’ll tell you, I think so. There you have your fettuccine toss up. Really simple, really easy. Now, the cake that’s baking in the oven, I’m gonna put this together really quickly for you. This is just a fourth of a cup of butter, and about… Let’s see here, fourth of a cup of butter, and six ounces of soft cream cheese. Or you can do a chunk of the eight-ounce pack that you’ve let come to room temperature, that will work too, all right? And we need to cream those together, just like this. Okay. Just cream the butter and the cream cheese together. And they’ve been kidding me all day about my bottle of vanilla here, but it really is vanilla and it’s very good. And no we’re not snorting or nipping on it, it’s just good vanilla. And we mixed that in with it too. And when we have fully creamed the butter and the cream cheese together, like so, then we’re gonna add two cups of powdered sugar and a teaspoon of lemon or orange zest. That just comes off… Get this here. That just comes off the outside part of your orange and you do it on, the grater that you have, do it on the smallest grate that you can, and it will work. This will be one of the best-tasting cream cheese frostings you’ve ever had. Great on a carrot cake, our zucchini cake, chocolate cake any kind of a cake, think you’re gonna like this one. So, so far today we’ve made our zucchini stuffed chicken, they’re in the oven roasting. We’ve also made our fettuccine toss up, which is there with the bits of ham in it and also the mushrooms. And then we made our zucchini cake with cream cheese frosting, all done with zucchini. Amazing, isn’t it? You thought that the only way you could eat it was like fried zucchini or some kind of a zucchini saute that you added other vegetables, Not so, there’s a lot of ways to do zucchini and we’ve just shown you three. Stay with us now. Here’s how you can get all of the recipes that you’ve seen on “At Home” today. We’ll be right back in just a minute.
- [Announcer] To receive the recipes presented on today’s program, plus many more great recipe ideas, send your best donation in a stamped self-addressed business-sized envelope to At Home, CTV Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. You’ll receive Arlene’s heartwarming newsletter, Enjoy, featuring an entire month of “At Home” recipes, including today’s mouthwatering dishes. Be sure to include the Enjoy issue number with your request.
- Well, here we are with all the dishes that we’ve prepared today with zucchini included in them. First, you have our zucchini stuffed chicken. That’s the chicken breast that we made the stuffing for with zucchini and mushrooms and all the good things, and we just stuffed it in there and baked it in the oven. Next to it is the fettuccine toss up. And that’s great ’cause it’s got a cream in the sauce with fettuccine underneath. This is our zucchini cake. You can see I did it in the the ring like we did and then I’ve also done it so you can see what it looks like in the the two bread pan types. And really there are so many recipes using zucchini. Like I said, it’s very versatile and it’s very delicious and very, very good for you. So stir up your creativity. Come on, think about ways you can use zucchini, like maybe pickles, like maybe hollow them out and stuff them with a meat filling and bake them in the oven. So many ways, just let your creativity be stirred up and think about it. Also, don’t forget to send a self-addressed stamped business-sized envelope so that you can get the newsletter that will include not just these recipes, but the whole month’s supply. And we hope that you’ve been enjoying this month when we’ve been helping you to know what to do with all the vegetables that you’re harvesting from your garden this fall. And I hope that you’ll use some of these recipes and make some for your family. Don’t forget, get those kids around you, give them a big hug, and let them know that you really care and that you love them. And don’t forget your husband while you’re at it ’cause he deserves a big hug too. And you deserve a great, big thank you from me. I’m so glad you joined us today. It’s really been great to have you here “At Home” with us. So be sure to join us the next time because it just wouldn’t be the same without you here “At Home.” We’ll see you then. Bye-bye now.
- [Announcer] Fresh produce provided by Jordan Banana, wholesalers of fresh fruit and vegetables in Dravosburg, Pennsylvania. Appliances provided by Dacor Distinctive Appliances, a reflection of your good taste. Groceries provided by Foodland, where the answer is always yes. Cornerstone Television wishes to thank all our faithful viewers whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.
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