🥒 Lesson 5: 10 Delicious Ways to Fix Zucchini | From Garden to Table Series
Zucchini is one of the most versatile and nutrient-packed vegetables you can grow in your garden—and in this video, I’ll show you 10 creative and delicious ways to cook, bake, blend, and enjoy your zucchini harvest!
Rich in vitamins A, C, and B6, plus fiber, potassium, and antioxidants, zucchini supports heart health, digestion, and immune function—all while being low in calories and easy to grow. Whether you’re picking it fresh from your garden or stocking up at the farmers market, these recipes will help you make the most of this amazing summer squash!
🍽️ Recipes Featured in This Video:
1. Fried Zucchini Hash – A crispy, golden pan-fried favorite
2. Zucchini Noodles – Cooked and used in place of spaghetti for a low-carb pasta dish
3. Zucchini Frittata – A protein-packed egg dish with garden veggies
4. Zucchini Pattie Pizzas – Mini zucchini-based crusts topped with your favorite toppings
5. Zucchini Vegetable Soup – Hearty and wholesome, also great for thickening broth
6. Raw Blended Zucchini Cream Soup – A creamy, cooling soup with a smooth finish
7. Zucchini Smoothies – Blend it raw into smoothies for hidden fiber and nutrition
8. Zucchini Pancakes – Light, fluffy, and savory—perfect for breakfast or dinner
9. Grilled Zucchini Fries – Crispy, smoky, and guilt-free
10. Zucchini Bread & Zucchini Apple Pie – Moist and naturally sweet baked treats that the whole family will love!
These recipes are kid-approved, budget-friendly, and perfect for anyone looking to eat healthier while enjoying the harvest. Whether you’re cooking off-grid, homesteading, or just want to get more veggies into your meals—this video is packed with inspiration.
[Music] Good morning, garden friends. It’s Christy with greenliving upgraded.com. Are you looking for a way to get more vegetables into your diet? Try growing zucchinis. I’m out here in my zucchini garden and I’ve just harvested one of my huge zucchinis. And I’m going to show you 10 different ways you can fix zucchinis. Check this out. An easy way to fix zucchini is to make zucchini hash. Just basically chop it up and and pan fry it. You can pan fry it with little yellow squash. Just slice it up like this and add a little bit of onion. And this makes a delicious side dish or afternoon snack. [Music] I’ll pan fry it with a little coconut oil. Add a little butter for flavoring, some garlic sauce, seasoning. It’s really good. [Music] Well, there it is. All done. The zucchini stir fry hash. Zucchini hash or zucchini stirfry, whatever you want to call it. Very good. All done. [Music] Another way to fix zucchini is as a base in pasta dishes or potato dishes. You can cook up the zucchini and you can put it down as a base and it put you like in spaghetti, you can put your spaghetti sauce over top of it. makes it really good. [Music] Another meal that’s really good is zucchini fritter or zucchini kiche made with grated zucchini, parsley, onion, oregano, and garlic mixed up with three eggs and biscuit mix. and baked in the oven. It’s absolutely delicious breakfast, lunch, or even a dinner side dish. So, while the zucchini is frying, I’m mixing up the dry ingredients. I have one cup of biscuit mix with 14 teaspoon of salt, 1/8 teaspoon of pepper, and a teaspoon of oregano. And then I’ve mixed in this cheese. And the next thing we’re going to do is we’ll mix in the fried zucchini and then add our three eggs. So, mix this all up. Just like that. Want to make sure it’s cool enough. I’ll throw the eggs in. But I don’t want it to fry the eggs right away. I have to wait till it cools off a little bit. Then we’ll throw in the three eggs. [Music] Make sure the stove is off, of course, before you do this. This will melt the cheese a little bit and make it a nice mixture with the two cups of cheese, mozzarella cheese, and a cup of uh cheddar cheese. [Music] All right. Once everything’s all mixed together, now we’re ready to put it in our grease baking dish. [Music] All right. Now, we’ll stick this in the oven 350° for 20 to 30 minutes. You know, your zucchini kiche is done when the cheese has turned a light brown on the top. [Music] Another way you can fix zucchini is to slice it up into wedges like this, like patties, and [Music] just uh beat up a little egg. Dip the patty in the egg. Give it something to to stick to. And then throw it in the breadcrumbs like that. Italian breadcrumbs. We’ll season it really nicely. And we’ll put parmesan on top. [Music] Cheese makes everything good. So, I put a little bit of Parmesan and now little bit of shredded cheddar and mozzarella cheese on these patties. Now, we’ll bake it at 350°. Well, here are my baked zucchini patties. I’ve put them in the convection oven for 12 minutes at 350°. Now, let’s take them out and see how they are. You can put some marinade sauce to make them really good. All right. Some marinade sauce in the zucchini patty. Make it really good. [Music] Almost as good as pizza. Zucchini patties with cheese, bread crumbs, baked and marinade on top. Delicious. [Music] Another way to fix zucchini is to chop it up and put it as a topping on a salad. Great addition to any salad. [Music] Another way to fix zucchini is to peel it and chop it up as an addition to soups. You can put it in potato soup or pasta soup, hamburger soup, chicken soup, vegetable soup, whatever you make. Zucchini is such a bland flavor that it can go in just about any soup and cook down if depending on how long you cook it. I’ve even added it to tomato tomato soup and I’ve cooked it long enough that you couldn’t even see that there was zucchini in the in the soup. But with its bland flavor, it just thickened the soup up a little bit and people couldn’t even tell there was one zucchini in the soup. So, zucchini is a great addition to any soup, and it can be used to thicken up a soup as well, depending on how fine you grate it before you put it in the soup, or you can just chop it up if you want to make it a chunky soup with zucchini in. Another way to fix zucchini is to peel it. You have to make sure you get every little bit of the skin off, but you peel it and make it into a raw cream zucchini soup that you will blend in the blender. So, this is not a cooked soup. This is actually just a raw blended zucchini soup. And for this soup, it’s very important that any bit of the skin is off. I even look to make sure even the green darker green edges are removed because with raw creamy zucchini soup if you leave any of the skin on because it’s not being cooked down it does change the flavor of it a little bit. All right, so I’ve got my chopped zucchini in here. Just going to add a little bit of water in the bottom. [Music] There you have it. This is zucchini cream soup. Now, you can eat it raw. Just add a little bit of seasoning, salt, uh garlic salt, whatever you want to do to season it. And you can just drink it just like that. Or you can add some berries and make a berry smoothie with this. Nothing like berry zucchini smoothies. Very good. Another way that you can use blended up zucchini is to throw it into pancakes or waffle mixes, in which case again you wouldn’t add any seasoning. You would uh you would just adjust your liquid to the additional liquid that you’re adding with the zucchini. Another [Music] way to fix zucchini is to slice it up the long way and then cut it into strips like this that you will make into zucchini fries and grill up on the barbecue. This is pretty easy to do. You just take these little zucchini fries. Spray them with olive oil. Just like that on both sides and get a good coat on them. And then you’ll sprinkle a little garlic salt on them like that. and grill them up on the barbecue. They make a real delicious barbecued grilled fries. Zucchini fries. Another recipe we can make with zucchini is zucchini bread. What you need to do to do that is grate up zucchini. [Music] Next, we mix up our dry ingredients and our wet ingredients separately so that then when we put everything together, we can get it a good consistency. So for the dry ingredients, I have three cups of flour, one teaspoon of salt, 1/4 teaspoon of uh baking powder, one teaspoon of cinnamon, and 1 teaspoon of baking soda, as well as 2 cups of sugar. And so I’m going to mix this all up. Make sure the baking soda and the baking powder is mixed in nice and evenly here in the dry ingredients. And then I already beaded up the three eggs, the one cup of oil, and one teaspoon of vanilla in the wet ingredient dish. Now, I’m going to mix in my zucchini. And for that, I’m going to need a measuring cup here because we need only two cups of zucchini is all that we need. So, I’m just going to pour in two cups worth. All right. So, I put the zucchini now into the wet ingredients. We’re going to mix this up. Now, we’re going to slowly mix in the dry ingredients, being careful not to put too much in at once when I mix it with the mixer, or it will cause a big poof of flour to come up. So, I’m going to just mix it in slowly and gently by hand, and then I will introduce the mixer in just a minute. Okay, while I added the rest of the dry ingredients, I’m going to stir this in again by hand. [Music] [Applause] All right. And mix it. There we go. All right. Now, we can put it in our greased and fled baking pans. There’s I have two of them here. And we’re going to bake it at 325° for 1 hour. So, I’ve got the oven preheating right now as I put these in the pans. [Music] Ah, take a look at the zucchini. Fresh out of the little oven I put them in. Man, do they look good. Ah, delicious. I can’t wait to taste this zucchini bread. Looks great. [Music] Last but not least, another thing you can do with zucchini is make desserts. Anything that any dessert that you would usually use apple in, you can usually substitute zucchini for it. So, like in the case of apple pie or apple bars or apple crisp, you can pretty much substitute the apples for zucchini. Now, I often like to throw in a mixture of zucchini and apples when I make apple pie or apple crisp. That’s because zucchini has just a slightly different taste than the apple. So when I mix it, the apples, the sweetness of the apples help to carry the original taste of the apple crisp or the apple bars or whatever it is that you’re making. So I do a mixture of 50/50. It’s not necessary, but I think it tastes better that way. So we’re going to make zucchini apple crisp now. So the first thing we need to do is slice the apples and the zucchinis. [Music] Now, the recipe calls for 10 apples. I think this is about 10 apples. I’m going to layer the first layer in the bottom of my greased dish approximately 9 or 10 by 10. I’m not exactly sure. So, I’m just going to put a layer of these zucchini apples in the bottom. Then, I’m going to sprinkle my mixture. It’s h one teaspoon of cinnamon, 1 tbsp of flour, and one cup of sugar. So, I’m going to sprinkle that over the top of this first layer and continue that pattern as I go through the rest of these slices. See if I can make two or three layers all together. [Music] [Music] I think I have enough of this last layer. Should look good. All right, there’s three layers. Just about right for this dish. Need just enough. And I’ll put the rest of this rest of this topping mixture on here. Okay. Now, as you do with any apple crisp, you cut in your one cube of butter with one cup of flour, one cup of oats, rolled oats, and one cup of brown sugar. And this makes a really nice topping. I also add in 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda and a teaspoon of baking powder just to help it set up properly and bake properly. But I think uh I think that’s pretty good now. So, we’ll go ahead and put this as a topping and pat it down over the top. [Music] All right, there’s my zucchini apple crisp ready to go in the oven. I’ve got it preheating right now to 375° and I’m going to bake it for an hour. All right, oven just finished. And oh, look at that. Very very delicious looking zucchini apple crisp. It’s bubbling and it looks to be done. So, I’ll just insert a little knife and yep, all the apples and zucchinis are done. Great. Get this out of the oven, let it cool, and then we can dish it up. Now, one thing I do when it’s still hot to help the crisp not stick so hard to the edges is I do like to cut the edges with a knife. Just cut along the edges and that just helps to break that the sugar that binds it to the edge when it bakes. So, do that. Then it can cool a little bit more and not very long, maybe 15 minutes. Then I can dish it up. Be just about right for this. Delicious. [Music] Just in time for dessert after all the meals we made today. This is a good way to end a day of cooking zucchini. I want to thank you all for watching and don’t forget to check us out at greenlivingoffgrid.com and like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. [Music]