Arlene is back with EVEN MORE zucchini recipes for this versatile summer vegetable. This episode from 2004 has recipes for fried zucchini sticks, a chocolate zucchini bread, and a cream of zucchini soup! Yum!
And here’s a helpful tip: For salads, sautées, roasted veggies, fried veggies, and other recipes where you’re chopping or slicing it into to pieces, it’s best to use small young zucchini because they have less seeds, less water, thinner skin, and a milder flavor. If you’re going to be shredding, grating, or pureeing the zucchini for a soup, bread, or cake, you can use bigger old zucchini since it’ll be ground up anyways.
Fried Zucchini Sticks
Ingredients
- 3 medium-sized zucchini
- salt & pepper
- flour for breading (about 1 cup)
- cracker meal for breading (about 2 cups)
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1 Tbs milk
- 1 lemon, cut into wedges (for garnish)
- grated Romano cheese (for garnish)
- vegetable or peanut oil, for frying
Instructions
- Wash zucchini, do not peel. Slice ends off, and cut lengthwise into sticks about 1/2 inch thick and 3 inches long. Sprinkle zucchini with salt and pepper.
- Whisk egg and milk together. Roll each zucchini stick in flour, then dip into egg mixture, then roll in cracker meal. Set aside.
- In a deep skillet, pour oil to a depth of about 2 inches. Heat to 325 degrees, or until a bread cube toasts quickly in the oil.
- Fry sticks in hot oil, turning occasionally until lightly browned and crisp on all sides, about 5-6 minutes. (Do not crowd pan.) Drain on a paper towel-lined plate or on a wire rack set over a baking sheet.
- Serve immediately with a squeeze of lemon juice and a sprinkle of Romano cheese. (They're also great with marinara sauce!) Makes 6 servings. Enjoy!
Cream of Zucchini Soup
Ingredients
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 2 Tbs butter
- 2 cans chicken broth (15 oz, each)
- 2 cups thinly sliced zucchini (do not peel)
- salt and pepper to taste
- 1 cup whipping cream (1/2 pint container)
- Parmesan cheese (for garnish)
- Chopped parsley (for garnish)
Instructions
- In soup pot or Dutch oven over medium high heat, saute onion in butter until translucent and just starting to brown. Add broth and zucchini. Simmer until tender, about 15-20 minutes.
- Working in batches, carefully spoon soup into a blender. DO NOT FILL BLENDER PAST 1/2 FULL; THE HOT SOUP WILL EXPAND AND CAN BLOW THE LID OFF. Cover the lid with a kitchen towel and puree soup. Pour soup into a serving bowl and repeat until all soup is pureed.
- Stir in whipping cream. Soup can be served hot or cold. Garnish with Parmesan cheese and parsley flakes. Makes 6 servings. Enjoy!
Chocolate Zucchini Bread
Ingredients
- 2 squares unsweetened baking chocolate (1 oz, each)
- 3 eggs
- 2 cups white sugar
- 1 cup vegetable oil
- 2 cups grated zucchini
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 2 cups flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- 3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease two 9×5" loaf pans
- In a microwave-safe bowl, microwave chocolate squares, stirring occasionally, until melted and smooth.
- In a large bowl, combine eggs, sugar, oil, zucchini, vanilla, and chocolate. Beat well.
- In a separate bowl, whisk flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Then stir flour into wet mixture. Once just combined, fold in chocolate chips. Pour batter into prepared loaf pans.
- Bake in a preheated oven at 350 degrees for 60-70 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of a loaf comes out clean. Makes 2 loves. Enjoy!
Transcript
- Hello and welcome to our program today, we’re so glad that you could join us here in the At Home kitchen, it’s always a pleasure and a joy to have you. Hope your day’s been wonderful, hope that something’s been accomplished that you’ve been endeavoring to do, and putting yourself, applying yourself to it, and you see the fruits of your labor, I hope that’s so. And if it wasn’t such a good day, guess what? There’s another chance tomorrow and it will get better. Whatever you’re going through today, this too will pass, it didn’t come to stay, it came to pass and you’ll be fine, you’ll be all right, just put your trust and confidence in the Lord, He will take you through, He will help you. I wanna read a letter that I got from a lady, this is really neat, she says, “dear Arlene, “I’ve enjoyed your program for a long time, “and the dishes you make. “I also enjoy your little talk about our Lord, “don’t ever stop talking about our Lord. “We need your help at times to guide us to the Lord ’cause “sometimes we tend to forget Him and with your help, “it puts us on the right track again. “We need to be reminded that the Lord is there for us no matter what we have done to hurt Him.” Interesting, huh? Thank you so much, Janet, that’s exactly the truth. What she said is exactly the truth, no matter what’s happened in the past, when we come to Him with an open heart and ask for forgiveness, He forgives us, He does it every time if we come with sincerity and genuine desire to be relieved of the sin that happened in our lives, He’s always faithful to wash it away with His precious blood. And so that’s how you can have peace today. Today we’re gonna talk about this guy right here, this is a zucchini. I’m sure you all know by now, here we are, harvest time, what this zucchini is all about. Well, we’re gonna show you three different dishes, completely unrelated to one another, on the program today. So, here’s today’s At Home Hint, and we’ll be right back to start our program in just a minute. Here’s today’s At Home Hint, to avoid freezer burn and ice crystals forming on foods, wrap the foods with plastic wrap or freezer paper and cover it with aluminum foil. If you’re storing foods for an extended period of time, also place the packaged food in a sealed baggie. 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 Cornerstone Television Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. Well, the zucchini kitchen, that’s what I’m calling the At Home kitchen today because we’ve got zucchini everywhere and we’re making all kinds of good things with it. And the first thing that we’re gonna do is make chocolate zucchini bread. I know you’ve had zucchini bread and we all like that, but this is a chocolate variation of that. And this uses these little Baker’s Unsweetened Squares that you buy, you take two of those, put them in a microwavable bowl like this, and put them in and just till they get nice, and thawed, and soft, and melted, that’s ready to go. All right, two of those. In a large bowl we’re going to put, we have three eggs here, we’re gonna put our eggs in… Now, this is gonna make two loaves of bread, not just one, two loaves of bread, which I like ’cause you can eat one now and wrap the other, put in the freezer, and you have it for a later time, okay? We combine the eggs and we have sugar here, we have a couple of cups of sugar, two cups of sugar, we have one cup of vegetable oil… I like ’cause you just stick all this stuff in at one time, you don’t have to cream and mix and cream and mix and all that, that’s a lot of pain and a lot of aggravation. Now we’re gonna put the zucchini that has been shredded, okay? This is two cups, and that’s shredded zucchini. It’s amazing when this hits the heat and it starts to cook, it goes down to nothing, there’s not very much of a substance to it ’cause there’s a lot of moisture in zucchini, okay? And then we’re gonna add some vanilla, notice I haven’t even turned this mixer on yet, ain’t that amazing? We have vanilla, and then we’re gonna… and we are gonna add our chocolate, there we go. My mother used to use this chocolate all the time when she would make chocolate frosting for a cake, and then we kinda got away from it, we started using the chocolate bits or cocoa, stuff that, so this is kinda nice to see this recipe using… This is the really good chocolate. I mean, this is yummy chocolate here. Can even tell the consistency is probably even a little bit better of a chocolate than the chips are, to me it seems anyway. Okay, we’ve got the chocolate in, here we go, push that back a little bit, now we’re gonna turn this on, we’re gonna let this blend a little bit, we want it to mix up pretty well. Your oven should be pre-heated to 350 degrees, really important that that oven is good and hot. Don’t put it in and then turn it on, that’s not how it works. Pre-heat your oven, okay? All right, now, always you wanna make sure, get in there and clean the edges of the bowl, stir it up, make sure… See how that’s hanging on the beaters, that’s okay, ’cause now what we’re gonna do, we’re going to add, we have some baking soda, about a teaspoon of baking soda, we’re gonna add that to our flour, and some cinnamon, we’re gonna add that also. And I’m just going to blend that through the flour so that it blends well once we get it into our other mixture, and I’m just gonna toss that in like that. Now, the only other thing that’s going in here are some chocolate chips, but I’m not gonna put those in with the mixer. All I’m gonna do is, very slowly, just until the flour has been incorporated in this, and then I’m gonna shut this off. Have your two pans ready, okay, because we’re gonna stir those chocolate chips in. They’re gonna get stirred in rather than beat in with the mixer because that would beat them apart and we don’t want that to happen. Okay, so now we’re just cleaning all the goodies off the beater like that, we get this off, and… there we go. Now I’m gonna scrape the flour to make sure the excess flour around the edge gets blended in there also, and now we’re going to fold in 3/4 cup of chocolate chips just like that. Simple, easy to do, not hard at all. Now, I have some wonderful bake pans, these are my loaf pans and they’re from Bake Works, you’re gonna see these a lot on our program. It’s a wonderful brand of bakeware that just joined us and we’re glad that they’re our sponsors, and these, you don’t even have to prepare the pan, all you do, make sure they’re clean of course, and then you just pour your batter into the pan, and I tell you when this comes out of the oven… This bakes for about 60 to 70 minutes. When this comes out of the oven, this will pop right out of these pans. I’m telling you, you never have to grease them or floor them for any reason, okay? So, we get this going here, we’re gonna put this in our oven, just like that, there we go, two of them, two loaf pans, isn’t this wonderful? In a preheated oven, let me… So, here we have our oven ready to go, and you want them not side by side because you want the air to circulate around them so that they bake nice and evenly, okay. Now what we’re doing, the second goodie that we’re making today, this is our zucchini soup, haha. What I’ve taken is just a medium onion and a couple of tablespoons of oil and I’ve sauteed it, I’ve browned it so it’s just got a little bit of color to it. Now, what we’re gonna add to this is two cans of chicken broth. If you make your own that’s fine, use it, if not, just buy in the can, it’s very good, you can get the low sodium, or you can get the reduced fat, or whatever you need to, but we’re gonna put that in because that’s the basis for our zucchini soup. We have the onions, we have some butter that we have browned them up in a little bit, instead of the oil it’s butter, now I’m gonna salt and pepper… Let me get my salt and pepper here, Salt, pepper, to your taste, to your liking. Okay, and I’m going to add my sliced, thinly sliced zucchini. See how thin this is? Very thinly sliced, the thinner the better because it’s gonna break down as it cooks. This is about two zucchinis. Now, you can make this ahead of time, you can put in freezer containers, long about the middle of December, You say, “oh my, I wish I had some of that zucchini soup.” Go to the freezer, bring it out, and you’ve got it. This is gonna cook for about 15 to 20 minutes till that zucchini breaks down. When it has broken down… Let me just make sure I have everything in here. Okay. When it breaks down we’re going to take one of those little blender wands and we’re gonna pulverize, or you can put it in your blender, and then we’re gonna add some cream to it. This can be served hot or cold. And then you just put a little bit Parmesan cheese and some parsley. This is wonderful zucchini soup. We’re gonna take a break and when we come back, we’ve got some more goodies coming up on our zucchini show here At Home. All right, we’re back with our… we’ve got our soup cooking, we have our chocolate zucchini bread in the oven baking, two loaves, 60 to 70 minutes, you wanna test that, you know how to test it with a tooth prick, and you’re gonna bring it out and let it cool about 10 to 15 minutes in the pan and then you’ll take it out and let it cool completely, wrap it in plastic wrap first and then in foil if you’re going to freeze it, if not, you still wanna wrap it well so that it doesn’t have a chance to dry out, okay? And that would be great with a little bit of cream cheese on it or something like that, a little bit of butter, that’d be great. Now, so we have the soup and that, now we’re gonna show you… I dunno if you’ve ever gone to a restaurant and said, “What do you have for a side order?” And they say, “Oh, how about fried zucchini or breaded zucchini?” Or do you ever try to make them? We’re gonna show you how today, okay. I have a couple of eggs and we’re just gonna beat them, and I have a zucchini, here, I’ll show you how you do this. You cut the ends off, you don’t peel it, you cut it down the middle, set it like that, and then you cut it in strips, and then I cut it in thirds, and when you get there here’s what you get, ’cause this is about the size pieces that you get when you get breaded zucchini, all right? So, we’re gonna add a little bit of milk to our beaten eggs and I’m going to salt and pepper them in the bowl. Some people will salt and pepper the flour, but the flour that’s left over it’s got all the goodies in and sometimes the vegetable doesn’t get the seasoning, and you want this to be seasoned ’cause you’re just gonna put it in some cracker crumb so there’s not really anything there to perk it up with, if you know what I mean. All right, so, we have these done, now, first thing I’m gonna do, make sure I do this right, we’re gonna roll each stick, these are called zucchini sticks, we’re gonna roll them in flour and then we’re gonna roll them in the egg bath, this is the egg bath, just like that. You always keep one hand dry and one hand wet. You drop it in the crumbs, like that, and then you’re gonna drop it in oil that is about two inches deep and it’s about 325 to 350 degrees, and it’s gonna start to fry and it will come to the top, and you’re gonna do that with every one of these little sticks, okay? You do it flour first because there’s moisture on that zucchini stick, and it’s wonderful because it will make the breading then adhere to it. My grandmother used to make veal cutlet, and her veal cutlet was wonderful because the breading always stayed on it. And everybody would say, “How come that breading stays on grandma’s veal cutlet?” Well, I know why, she told me, “I always put flour on at first darling, ‘I always put flour on at first.” Because, see how when you put that flour, how it sticks to that because of the moisture on the zucchini stick, then you cover that over with the egg, then you cover it all over with the corn meal, I’m sorry, cracker meal. This is cracker meal, not breadcrumb. Okay? Okay, and just keep dropping them, you can make a lot of these at one time. If you’re making them for a whole group of people, I would suggest that when they’re brown, they only cook about maybe five, six minutes until they’re brown, you bring them out, you can put them on a paper towel lined dish, and what happens then is it will drain, and then you wanna put them on a dish and put them in an oven of about 200, and that’ll keep them crisp and it’ll also keep them hot. Then you can serve everybody at one time, and that’s kinda nice. Zucchini, I’ll tell ya, somebody said to me today, “You know, there’s a national holiday “that’s absolutely on the books “and has to do with zucchini.” And I said, “Well, what’s that?” And they said, “The national holiday is, have you put a zucchini “on your neighbor’s porch yet day?” And we laughed about it, but someone else walked in and said, “Oh yeah, I know that’s true, I saw that somewhere.” I think that’s hysterical ’cause this time of the year everybody’s saying, “Hey, could you use a zucchini?” And you’re saying, “Well, I could if I could get rid of “the other four I have in my refrigerator right now, “I probably could use one more.” But you know, you could shred your zucchinis and package them, and freeze them, bring them out and make zucchini bread in the middle of winter ’cause it works, it absolutely works. Not a difficult situation at all. When you’re gonna serve these, they could be as a side dish for a meal, like an entree, or you could also serve these like an appetizer, and I would do it with like a marinara sauce. My favorite way when I get these at a restaurant or when I eat them, I like them with loads of fresh lemon juice all over them and then I sprinkle Romano cheese, that’s my very favorite way, oh boy, yummy, yummy, delicious. Also, I might remind you that the moisture comes out when you add the salt to them, so that brings the moisture out of the zucchini and that also makes the flour adhere to it better. Okay, let’s see here. We’re coming along with this, this is fun, the kids could even do some of this stuff, you know? I mean, really, why not get the kids involved? Why not let them, you know, we have… Whoops. We have our kids, my nephews, great nephews, they love to puts in the kitchen, I’m amazed. They’ll say, “Oh, we made cookies, or we made this, or we did that.” And I love to see that because that tells me that their mothers are allowing them to get in the kitchen with them, number one, so they’re gonna learn things about cooking and safety in the kitchen. I think I’ve told you before, how I grew up with a girl who was never allowed to be in the kitchen at her house. She’d go in there to make something and her mother would say, “Get outta here, you’re making a mess.” And as a result, she grew up and never knew how to cook. To this day, she doesn’t know how to cook. I always felt bad ’cause I thought, “Man, those are things that are important for us to know for a lifetime.” I even think it’s great for boys to know how to cook because if they’re bachelors, they don’t get married for a while, they need to know how to cook, they need to know how to fend for themselves. And some of the guys here on the crew, we talk about it, they know how to get along in a kitchen, I think it’s great. So, let’s take a look here now, lemme wipe my hands. Ah, they’re coming nice and brown, look at that, when they float to the top and they’re nice and brown… I think I’m gonna use the slotted spoon. Look at there, ah, aren’t they beautiful? And you just wanna… When they get to the brown, the shade of brown that you like, you bring them out and you’re gonna put them, again, on this paper towel lined dish, set up like this because you don’t want them to be full of grease. Now, you know the key about grease and about deep frying? If you have the oil or the grease hot enough that when you put the particular food, whether it’s chicken, or these or whatever, if you put that in when the grease is hot, it will not soak through the food. And you will not… If you can see, take a close up of that, Vinny, there’s no grease, hardly any grease showing up on this paper towel at all because this was hot when I put these in and they cooked, and so it didn’t absorb the grease. That’s the difference between good frying and not so good frying, if you know what I mean. I’m gonna keep frying and we’re gonna take care of our soup, and we’ll come back in just a moment. Stay with us, we’ll be right back. Now, you be sure to send for your recipes. And I got a letter here from a lady that said, “I’m disappointed that the only way you can receive the newsletter is by email.” Not true, honey. We will always make the recipes for At Home available through the regular mail because we know that everybody does not have a computer. However, if you do have a computer, you can go to www.ctvn.org and there you click on the At Home button and it will take you through the process, you need to do it with a credit card of a subscribing to our ease in and joy newsletter, that comes to your email address at the beginning of every month without you sending for anything, which is great. And, something new that we’ve just been adding to our… This I’m so excited about, If you click on a recipe, say you click on one of the ones we’ve done today, and you want to see how I prepared it, you hit a button right next to it and it will show you, what you saw today, demonstrated for that particular recipe. Isn’t that neat? And we’re also going to have a button there that you can see all the inspirational messages that we do at the beginning of the program. So I’m excited about that. We’re trying to make it good for you, we’re trying to make it exciting for you and something that you enjoy. And we like to interact with you, I like to get your comments and your requests, and even your recipes when you email them to me, I appreciate that. Well, zucchini was the center of the stage today and here’s what we did, let’s take our trip around the table, there is our chocolate zucchini bread, that honestly tastes like a cake. It is so moist, so wonderful, you get two nice big loaves of bread, use one now, wrap one with a foil for later. Next, here’s our soup. This soup is awesome. What we do, we finish it by adding a little bit of cream to it, stirring it up and we put it through the blender, and look, is this gorgeous? With some wonderful cheese on top, a little bit of Parmesan cheese, it can be served hot or cold, our zucchini soup. And next to that, here are our zucchini sticks, breaded zucchini sticks. I told you the way I like them, you squeeze some lemon juice over them, just like that, and then a sprinkling of some Parmesan cheese or Romano cheese, whichever you prefer, I like the Romano, the best on this. All right, if you have enjoyed the program, how about letting us know? We always like to get mail from you, and again, don’t forget, Sunday’s coming in a couple of days and you need to be in church. It’ll make you feel good all week long and it’ll make God happy. So until the next time, be sure to join us because you know what? Without you being there, it just wouldn’t be the same without you here At Home. We’ll see you then.
- [Presenter] Furnishings provided by Levin Furniture, featuring Lane’s Country Living Collection. Food provided by Jordan Banana Company, wholesalers of fresh fruit and vegetables, in Dravosburg, Pennsylvania.
- [Narrator] Cornerstone Television wishes to thank all our faithful viewers whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.
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