Zucchini Casserole - more delicious than it sounds!

I know this isn't a dessert, but it goes in the oven and it's my favorite meal ever.

At the height of zucchini season here in Ithaca, coworkers bring in bounty from their gardens.

I used said squash in this casserole, and I got to cook it on the grill since mine acts like an oven. Win-win. Local food, not heating up the kitchen with the real oven. Woe is the baker in summer.

This casserole is very simple to make, and you most likely have all the ingredients lying around the house, save the zucchini. You can change the recipe to add meat, try different thickeners, spices, or you could change out zucchini for another vegetable if you want. But just look how beautiful it is, all sliced up...

The carrots, too!

Okay enough pictures of vegetables for a while. Here's the recipe!

Zucchini Casserole

2 extra large zucchini, or 4-5 less gigantic zucchini, sliced very thin

1 large white onion, chopped

3-4 carrots, peeled

2 cloves garlic, minced (optional)

8 oz sour cream or creme fraiche

1 can condensed cream of chicken soup (could also use cream of mushroom, but I never have)

stuffing mix or breadcrumbs

butter

salt

white ground pepper

other spices optional (ground mustard, basil, red pepper flakes etc)

Preheat the oven to 350F (or start your grill that acts like an oven: Holland Grill). Prepare the baking dish by melting some butter and mixing it with the breadcrumbs/stuffing mix. You need just enough of this mixture to coat the bottom of your oven safe casserole dish and top of your casserole.

Add the sliced zucchini and chopped onion to a large pot of water and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer/lightly boil for five minutes.

While simmering, prepare the carrots and garlic. Once the peel to the carrot is gone you could just keep peeling and peel until there's no more carrot left, which is what I did. Or you could use a microplane and grate the carrots. Or you could chop them up. It depends on what you want your carrot experience to be here, just make sure they are in smallish pieces.

Drain the boiled zucchini and onion very thoroughly. Return to the pan and add the carrots, garlic, spices, soup, sour cream and mix until everything is coated and incorporated. Pour into the prepared casserole dish and cover with the remainder of the stuffing and butter mixture.

Bake in the preheated oven (or grill) for 30 minutes with a lid on (if you don't have a lid use tin foil). Uncover and bake for another 5 minutes to crisp up the top.

Happy Baking!

-Sarah

Something Chocolatey

Hello! Sorry it's been a while. Things have been busy in Ithaca, what with the fourth of July, running a 5K, and moving out of my house. But I have been baking! So fear not, you will have in your hands by the end of this post, a delicious recipe for "something chocolatey." And it is definitely chocolatey. And delicious. And it's totally okay to eat as dinner. I ran a 5K, it's allowed.

Dinner!

Okay. So this post is about a recipe I'll call "The Triple Threat." It's a chocolate cookie, with chocolate chips and white chocolate chips. Also known as "Yes, Please." The cookie itself is dense without being heavy and is chock full of flavor. I've found it's fun to experiment with different cocoas and different cocoa ratios. This time I used a fifty:fifty mix of a medium cocoa and a dark cocoa. The result was a dark chocolate cookie, but not enough to make you think that it's too dark. I think that if I had used all dark cocoa it might have been a little on the bitter side, so I lucked out there.

All the dries. Note the two different cocoa colors! Pretty!

The kind of chips you use is totally up to you. I used semi sweet and white chocolate, but using peanut butter and milk chocolate would be just as scrumptious. I think the white chips added a bit of sweetness that cut down on any astringency that may have started to build up from the cocoas. You could also use chocolate chunks. That's always fun since when the cookies are still warm from the oven it's a bigger chunk of hot gooey goodness. A mix of chips and chunks would be even better since then you're not sure what you're going to get! Experiment, go crazy, the more chips the better! My only recommendation is to not have so many chips that you don't overpower the dough with chips since then you'll just get burnt chocolate and not so baked cookies. The most chips per batch I would do is fifty:fifty cookie:chips.

And now for the recipe!

Recipe: The Triple Threat

1 cup butter, softened (microwave for 10 seconds or beat with a rolling pin!)

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp vanilla

2 cups flour

2/3 cup cocoa powder

3/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

2 cups semi sweet chips

1/2 cup white chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350F

Mix flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt together

Beat butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla until light and fluffy in a separate bowl

Stir the dries into the wet ingredients until well blended. Mix in chips. Drop on cookie sheets by rounded teaspoonfuls.

Bake for 8-10 minutes.

Happy baking!

-Sarah