Our Annual What-to-do-with-Zucchini Recipe: Zucchini Corn Medley

Surely you don’t have too much zucchini: surely the one plant you grew (you didn’t plant a whole row, did you???) isn’t squirting out little squashes faster than the blink of an eye, nor are your friends and relatives pressing arm loads on you. Hah!

So here is our perhaps twelfth annual what to do with zucchini recipe, supplied this time by Sharon Frost in Calais, with additional suggestions from Ruth Thurston in Machias. I made it as a contribution to a supper with friends the other night and was happy with how easily it went together, how well it held up from assembly to consumption without getting soggy, and how tasty it was accompanying my friend Laura’s chicken piccata.

The recipe calls for small zucchini which means you have to take your sleeping bag out to the garden and sleep next to the plant so you can be there to grab that little squash before it balloons into a twenty-five pound behemoth. Now “small” zucchini may be a relative term: small compared to a big one might be a ten-inch long one compared to an eighteen inch one. I suppose two nice six to seven-inch squash might be the ticket. Mine was closer to twelve, so I quartered it length wise and removed the seeds and was happy with the results. I used the last bit of my frozen corn from last summer because this year’s crop is just beginning. Sharon’s recipe called for a quarter cup of chopped onion, so I just used a small onion.

Ruth and Sharon’s recipe had a lot in common as far as ingredients went, but Ruth’s added red pepper and eliminated corn. Also, Ruth’s was a microwave version, requiring two three-minute blasts on full power for cooking and one two-minute period for finishing it up. That suggests that if you need to get supper together quickly, microwave cooking is definitely an option for this dish.

You’ll need tomato sauce or prepared spaghetti sauce. I used plain home-canned tomato sauce. Oregano and basil add flavor and because I love garlic, I added a chopped clove of it along with the onion. Both recipes call for grated cheese stirred in but I sprinkled mine on top. Ultimately, the recipe that follows is my tinkered-with version, but I depended on Sharon’s for getting me there.

Altogether, perfectly lovely. Stick this one into your recipe box under “z” for “zucchini.” P.S. It works with yellow summer squash, too.

Zucchini Corn Medley
Serves: 4
 
Ingredients
  • 2 tablespoons butter or olive oil
  • 2-3 small zucchini cubed
  • 1 cup corn kernels
  • 1 small onion, chopped
  • 1 clove of garlic, optional
  • ¼ cup tomato or spaghetti sauce
  • ¼ teaspoon dried oregano or more to taste
  • ¼ teaspoon dried basil or more to taste
  • ¼ to ½ cup grated cheddar cheese
  • Salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
  1. Salt and pepper to taste
  2. Melt the butter or heat the olive oil in a large sauté pan.
  3. Add the zucchini, corn, onion, and optional garlic and sauté until the vegetables are just tender.
  4. Stir in the tomato sauce, herbs, and cheddar and cook for a couple more minutes, taste and adjust seasonings.
  5. Serve.

 

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.