Recipe #13 - Grilled Stuffed Zucchini

My fantastic neighbors just keep hooking me up with fresh zucchini from their garden, which is great because I love it.  Due to the fact that I put on a huge musical production in April and we did some seriously fun traveling in May, my garden didn't get in this year.  In some ways it nice, but in others ways I miss it.  Zucchini is one of the things that I miss.

Today's recipe is Grilled Stuffed Zucchini found on page 194 or online here.  Honestly, it was a little more time consuming than I expected, but I thought it was worth it!

First you cut the zucchini in half and hollow out the center.

 
Next you rub olive oil on the zucchini and sprinkle with salt and pepper.  You set that aside while you prep the "stuffing".  I have actually made this recipe before (last summer) and I remember wishing that I had more stuffing.  Since my zucchini was a tiny bit on the bigger side, I decided to double the filling.

First you need Italian turkey sausage.  This is the kind I purchased:

You need one link of this kind, but since I doubled it I used two.  You remove the casing and brown the sausage.  Once that is done you add garlic, onion and diced zucchini.  It wasn't until I sat down to write this that I realized that I was supposed to use red onion.  Oops, I even bought one for this recipe.  Oh well, too late now!

When the onions are soft, you remove it from the heat and add a few more ingredients.

Now is when the zucchini hits the grill for the first time.  You grill it hollowed side down for 5 minutes.  Then you fill it will delicious goodness, top with cheese and bread crumbs, and grill for another 5-7 minutes.

And this is what the final product looks like:

We had it as a main course tonight, but it is intended to be a side dish.  However, I knew that my kids wouldn't like it enough for it to be main course worthy.  So they got mac and cheese with sausage in it, but they were required to at least taste the zucchini.  At the end of dinner, both of my girls' plates looked like this:

That's one lone bite of zucchini that had to be tried before they were allowed to leave the table.  I'm an evil mom.

My husband and I loved it though.  Ryan said that it was something he would expect to be served at a fancy restaurant.  He added it to his "make again" list.  My twelve year old actually really liked it and was bummed we didn't save him more.  But as for my girls...

...thinking they didn't like it so much...