Episode 025 Pizza Zucchini Boats

Intro: Welcome to Let’s Make Dinner, your audio library of amazing dinner recipes you can get on the table any night of the week. I’m your host, Susie Weinrich. 

Susie Weinrich: What’s up everybody? Today I have a delicious and healthy recipe for you. We don’t do healthy a ton around here, so I thought I would sneak one in. We are making pizza zucchini boats for dinner. If you like pizza and maybe you’re trying to eat a little bit healthier, this is a great alternative to just ordering pizza or making a frozen pizza. So instead of a pizza crust, we’re actually going to use a hollowed-out zucchini and fill it with all of your favorite pizza toppings. And it is delicious. I promise you, you won’t miss the bread, and in fact, you may want to make your pizzas this way from now on. Although a thick-crust pizza can’t be beat once in a while, right? So this recipe prep is going to take you about 15 minutes. The cook time is about 30 minutes, so you’re about 45 minutes in total. 

The ingredients you’re going to need are, of course, fresh zucchini, Italian sausage, onion, garlic, dried basil and dried oregano, a marinara sauce or pizza sauce, and then some of your favorite pizza toppings. For this recipe, we’re going to recommend black olives, bell peppers, and mushrooms, and then of course you need shredded mozzarella cheese. 

Pizza Zucchini Boats Recipe: Let’s get right into making your pizza zucchini boats, or do we want to call them zucchini pizza boats? I guess it’ll work either way. You’re going to preheat your oven to 350 and you’re going to prepare a large casserole dish, so at least a nine by 13 or larger if you have it. Spread about half a cup of the marinara or pizza sauce across the bottom. Then you’re going to just go ahead and set that aside.

Your next step is to hollow out your zucchini. So what I like to do is line up three to four fresh zucchini. Cut the ends off of each side and then split them in half. So you’re going to end up with six to eight zucchini pizza boats. Next, you want to take a spoon and hollow out the inside of each zucchini, so you’re making literally what looks like a canoe or a boat. You want to leave a little bit at the end to hold the pizza toppings in, but otherwise, just take that spoon and scrape out that seedy middle portion. Then go ahead and set those right into your prepared casserole dish. 

Next, we’re going to prepare the filling that’s going to go in your pizza boats. So you’ll take a skillet over about medium heat, and you’re going to brown and crumble the Italian sausage. One of my favorite kitchen tools that I have is what I call a meat masher. If you’ve listened to some of the other episodes, you’ve probably heard me talk about it. It looks like a little spatula that has about five prongs on it and helps you crumble your ground meat. It works really, really well on any kind of sausage because when you’re crumbling sausage, it can be kind of sticky and it just works right through it. So I will link that product in the show notes for you. 

As soon as your Italian sausage is completely cooked through, drain off any excess grease, then you’re going to lower the heat to medium-low and add half a cup of chopped onions, three chopped garlic cloves, half a teaspoon of dried basil, half a teaspoon of dried oregano, and then just saute that until the onions are slightly softened, so about five minutes. Then you’ll finish by stirring in one cup of marinara sauce or pizza sauce. We highly recommend RAOs pasta sauce. We’re not sponsored by them. We just love the RAOs marinara or the RAOs, what is it? Basil Marinara, I think? I think it’s tomato basil marinara. It is delicious and is perfect for these zucchini pizza boats.

All right, time to put everything together. So in those hollowed-out zucchini boats that you have in that casserole dish, divide the sausage mixture equally among all of those zucchini boats. Then you will divide equally a half a cup of black olives, a half a cup of sliced mushrooms, a half a cup of diced bell peppers across all of the pizza boats. Then you will divide one and a half cups of shredded mozzarella cheese across all of the pizza boats as well. 

Now it’s time to bake. My tip for whenever you’re baking something that has cheese on top and you have to cover it with foil, take your large sheet of foil and spray the underside with some type of non-stick spray. That will make it so that when you actually pull the foil off, it doesn’t pull all the cheese off with it. So spray some foil, cover that dish, and bake it at 350 for 20 minutes. Then once that is up, you’ll remove the foil, pop it back in the oven for about 10 more minutes, and that’s it. You just want to let them cool for about five minutes and it is time to eat. 

These are actually quite filling, so when you’re serving the zucchini boats, I recommend serving two per person. If you have some really hungry people, they might want to eat three. As far as side dishes go, just a simple side salad or a Caesar salad would be delicious paired with your zucchini pizza boats. 

As always, I will link all of the recipes and all of the equipment that I talked about in this episode right in the show notes so you can find them when you’re ready to make these for dinner.

If you are enjoying these episodes of Let’s Make Dinner, I would love it if you would subscribe or follow in your preferred podcast player. That will just make it so that you can find all of our future and new episodes right in your podcast feed. 

Outro: Until next time, I hope this episode of Let’s Make Dinner makes your dinner time a little easier.