Lock Your Car, It's Zucchini Season

A Recipe for Stuffed Zucchini and Peppers

Each summer, gardeners face an abundance of zucchini and are often in desperate need of good recipes to use them up. You may be used to stuffed "zucchini boats," where the cook slices the zucchini the long way and scoops out a space for the filling. This recipe cuts, cores, and stuffs zucchini Lebanese-style, hollowing out a tube for stuffing.

I was lucky to find small, round zucchini at Carmody Farm in Cheshire, but this recipe works equally well if you chunk a large zucchini into several 4" segments.

JILL R. KELLY PHOTOS

Carmody also had a pretty variety of small peppers.

Stuffed Zucchini and Peppers is a very forgiving recipe. All amounts are approximate. The result will be good with a bit more or less of anything. If you leave out the chili sauce, it makes a meal that is popular with children.

I have written this recipe with instructions for cooking in the Instant Pot, for convenience on a busy week night, but you can also cook it on the stovetop for a long, slow simmer.

Two ingredients in this recipe may be unfamiliar to some readers, but both can be easily obtained: bulgur wheat and Asian chili-garlic sauce. Bulgur, also called bulgar or burghul, is the grain used to make tabbouleh, the popular Middle Eastern parsley salad. The recipe will turn out fine with any type of bulgur; you don't need to find coarse, but it is nice and chewy. The chili-garlic sauce can be substituted with any hot sauce (if you like it) and a crushed clove of garlic.

Ingredients:

several peppers, depending on size, stems and seeds removed

1 or 2 big zucchini, cut into 4” segments and cored

or several small round zucchini, cored

(It's not a bad idea to place the raw vegetables into your pot to see how many will be able to fit comfortably.)

1 cup bulgur wheat

8 to 16 oz. ground beef (optional)

1 onion

1 heaping tbsp tomato paste

1 heaping tbsp Asian chili-garlic sauce (or to taste)

3 tbsp olive oil

4 ripe summer tomatoes

2 cloves garlic, crushed

about 2 tbsp white vinegar

1-2 cups broth, any kind

one handful each fresh parsley and mint

salt and pepper

Instructions:

Heat the olive oil and saute the tomato paste and garlic-chili sauce for a few minutes. Add the bulgur. Mix and fry for about 5 minutes on medium heat. Add one cup of water and set aside to cool and soak.

Use that time to get everything else ready. Grind the onion and the herbs in a food processor. Separately grind the tomatoes to a puree.

In a large bowl, combine the ground onion and herbs, salt, pepper, and a few spoonfuls of the tomato. Add the bulgur mixture and the raw meat and mix well. Stuff the vegetables with this mixture. If there is extra filling, make a few meatballs. Pile the stuffed vegetables and meatballs into the Instant Pot (or other pot).

Pour the tomato puree over the vegetables. Add garlic, vinegar, salt and pepper. Then add the broth. These will get mixed as the Instant Pot cooks.

Set the Instant Pot to low-pressure cook for 30 minutes.

If cooking on the stovetop, cover and bring the pot to a boil. Turn to low, cover, and simmer for one hour.

Serves 4-8, depending on your choices about the number of vegetables and quantity of meat.

Extra: Yoghurt Sauce

We usually eat these stuffed vegetables with an easy yoghurt sauce.

Combine about a cup of plain yoghurt with a crushed garlic clove, a few teaspoons of lemon juice, a splash of olive oil, and salt to taste. Mix well to fully incorporate the oil.

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