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My garden is pumping out gigantic zucchini – at three to four pounds apiece, they are almost bigger than my dog. While smaller zucchinis are preferred for cooking, these enormous zucchinis are better off used as “boats” for dishing delicious food directly into your mouth.
'Large zucchini have a tendency to be stringy on the inside and therefore are harder to cook with. I've found the best way to utilize these gigantic squash is to fill them up and roast them - resulting in a deliciously tender zucchini.
To start, trim the ends of the zucchini and cut it down the middle lengthwise. I let mine rest for a few minutes after slicing and scraping out the seeds with a melon baller - if it's super fresh, as mine were, they'll slowly start to get beads of moisture on them, which makes it easier to get the zucchini drier for cooking.
You want to try to get as much of the moisture out of the zucchini as possible, so I pressed paper towels in the centers of each, then let sit for about an hour. I rotated or switched out the paper towels as needed to get out as much liquid as I could. Too much moisture and your zucchini boats will sink!
After drying them as much as I could, I popped the zucchini into the oven as it preheated. This also helps to evaporate the moisture contained in the zucchini flesh.
While the oven preheats, start the filling. I decided to make a simple meat sauce from scratch. Saute the onions and garlic until fragrant then deglaze the pan with a touch of red wine.
Let the wine evaporate to about half it's volume, then add in your herbs and spices. I used some garden fresh peppers to pump a little heat into my sauce.
Once stirred together and all the liquid has evaporated from the pan, remove the mixture to a separate bowl or plate and wipe the skillet clean to brown and crumble the ground beef.
Once the beef is cooked and rinsed, the onion and herbs can be added back to the skillet.
Because I'm also drowning in tomatoes from my garden, I decided to mash up a bunch for my tomato sauce base. In the past I've used canned tomatoes - whatever you have on hand works!
As with the zucchini, you want to try to evaporate as much of the liquid from skillet as possible. If the filling is too wet, it will cause the boats to get too soft.
The meat filling should just barely be past a "saucy" consistency - meaning it should move and pour like a sauce, but be really thick while staying together.
Adding mozzarella cheese will also help keep the filling together - I actually used chopped up string cheese, but pearls or shredded mozzarella can be used too.
Fill up the boats so they are over flowing. As my zucchini boats baked, I boiled up some pasta and popped it into the dish for the last ten minutes of cooking.
Zucchini boats are ideal for shipping food directly into your mouth. Now that I know how to cook giant zucchini, I think I'll definitely be letting my zucchini get huge!
