Stuffed Zucchini In Tomato Sauce Or Kousa Recipes

LEBANESE STUFFED ZUCCHINI

Steps:

• Wash and dry the zucchinis, cut off the stalks and slice off the dried tips at the opposite end without removing too much flesh.
• Carefully hollow out the zucchini. Start from the stalk end by inserting your corer about 3/4 of the way into the zucchini, making sure not to poke the bottoms or the tender skin of the zucchinis. Twist the corer and pull out the zucchini flesh. Do this a few times, until you have a generous cavity.
• Set cored zucchini aside.
• In your food processor, add the cut pieces of tomatoes and pulse a few times until well blended.
• In a large mixing bowl, thoroughly mix the stuffing ingredients of rice, ground beef, butter, fresh blended tomatoes, spices and salt until fully combined (I do this by hand).
• Using your hands stuff the zucchini with the beef mixture, leaving half of an inch free at the top to allow the filling to expand.
• Repeat for the rest of the hollowed zucchini.
• Arrange the stuffed zucchinis in a large pot, add water, just enough to slightly cover the zucchinis.
• Cover the pot, place on medium-high heat, and bring water to a boil.
• Reduce heat to medium- low, add tomato sauce or tomato paste, or both ( depending on how thick you like you sauce to be).
• Cover the pot and simmer for 45 minutes or until the zucchini is tender and the rice stuffing is fully cooked.
• Taste the sauce and adjust salt if you'd like.
• Transfer to a serving plate, serve and enjoy!

STUFFED ZUCCHINI IN TOMATO SAUCE OR KOUSA

Steps:

• Choose either medium or small zucchini. Wash well cut of stem end. Using a corer hollow out zucchini leaving rounded end intact. Try not to puncture the skin. Soak in salted water for 10 minutes.
• Gently fry onion in butter until transparent. Add pine nuts after 10 minutes cook with onions for another 10 minutes, stir occasionally.
• Add pan contents to ground meat, rice parsley, spice and about a teaspoon of salt and pepper and 1/4 cup of water if need to be easy to work with (I don't add water).
• Fill zucchini with stuffing. (The rice expands and the meat will shrink so fill them all the way).
• Prepare the sauce: in a frying pan gently fry chopped onion in butter. When transparent add chopped garlic cook for a few seconds and chopped peeled tomatoes, tomato paste, water and cinnamon with salt and pepper to taste.
• Ladle some of the sauce into the bottom of a heavy based pan, arrange zucchini in layers adding sauce to each layer, you may have 2-3 layers of zucchini. Or I stand them up on end with the open side up (again DH tells me this is not the "proper" way to do it but if they burn then only the one end is ruined).
• Add enough water to just cover the zucchini with sauce, you may or may not need to do this depending on how much sauce you have.
• Cover and simmer gently for 1 1/4 hours or until veggies are tender and rice is cooked.
• Serve hot or warm with sauce and Arabic pita bread for dipping.