This Zucchini Dish Stole Shabbat!

Lentil and rice stuffed zucchini is a healthy, plant-based, Mediterranean-style dish often referred to as a variation of Kousa Mahshi (Lebanese stuffed squash). It features zucchini halved lengthwise, filled with a mixture of cooked lentils, rice, aromatics, and spices, then baked until tender. 

Watch Micah put this dish together for Shabbat.

Transcript

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Hi Micah and welcome to Shabbat Club, where good food, friends, and hosting come together for Shabbat. Shabbat is all about the food, but it's also about the meaning behind it. And I love sharing my favorite tips and tricks for hosting, cooking, and getting together, no matter if you have a big group or small. At the end of the day, it's what's around your table. So grab a seat at mine. Welcome to Shabbat Club. For this Shabbat, we are making a lentil and rice baharat stuffed zucchini. That is a mouthful and it's delicious. This is kind of a more technical recipe, but you can totally do it. It's no problem. The first thing you need is lentils and rice. We're going to add some vegetable broth to this or water, whatever we want. Some garlic, something you measure with your heart, not with a teaspoon or tablespoon, but this is four cloves. The recipe says two, whatever. And some onion. And mint. We're also going to add 14 ounces of canned tomatoes. I only have a 20-ounce jar, so we're just gonna eyeball half. We are going to let this sit with a little bit of salt. My baharat seasoning. That smells so good. So fragrant. And some sesame seeds. I do need parsley and dill, but guess who forgot to get it from the store this week, so it's on its way. That's me. That's me. I think that this perfectly shows that Shabbat hosting doesn't need to have any sort of perfection in it. I am the least person, I am the least perfect person ever. Ask my mother-in-law. She'd agree. There's a little Jewish drama for you over there. But what Shabbat does need is intention and it needs people and it needs the will together, and it needs wanting to be with others. And so that's exactly what I bring to my Shabbat table. I'll let this sit for about 30 minutes to start hydrating the rice and the lentils, and while we do that, let's prep our zucchini. This is kind of the most technical aspect of it, but my friend who's coming for Shabbat this week is obsessed with zucchini. Anytime she sees zucchini on the menu, she orders it. She'll order it twice, three times if we let her. So this one is in her honor. Okay, so close enough. Zucchini. Zucchini is one of those things where in the summer you have way too much of it all the time, and in the winter it's still there all the time, so you really can't get away from it. My husband hates zucchini. He'll just have to deal this week. You can't please everyone. So, zucchini. I like using smaller ones. They just have a little bit more flavor, usually have a little less water content, and are a little bit more tender. So once you have your zucchini, you're gonna want to trim the ends off just slightly. You don't need this little piece. So we'll take all those off. You need about six to seven, six to eight depending on the size. This dish is meant to be made for someone that you love because it takes a little bit of time and it takes a little bit of patience, and so only make this dish for someone you like. Don't like it, don't make it for them. Alright. I'm gonna slice each of these in half. Each serving will be about three to four halves of zucchini, depending on how hungry you are. You are. And so once you have your half like this, it's time to hollow it out. So what we're gonna do is we're actually going to stuff this rice and lentil mixture inside. You heard it. So I like to use a melon baller, but not everyone is like me, not everyone has a melon baller handy because not everyone's crazy like me. So you can also use teaspoons or even a paring knife. Let me show you how. You take your melon baller and you start to hollow it out, leaving as much of a border on your zucchini. These guys are actually quite small, so I might need to use something smaller for the small ends, and then use that melon baller as I get to a bigger one. Just hollow it out as best as you can. I'm actually gonna use like a little quarter teaspoon. No one's necessarily gonna see the inside of this, so just do your best. It's not gonna be perfect. This is why you only make this for someone you really like. But I will say it's kind of therapeutic. And I could use a therapy. So now you've got a nice little hollow zucchini. Put this to the side and keep going. All of this extra zucchini insides, you can toss it, compost it, give it to the dog, or what I like to do is I actually will freeze it and put it in my smoothie. That's where I'm gonna get my veggies in my smoothie. Smoothies are such a good way to reduce some of your food waste. So anytime you have these leftover bits and bobs from your veggies, just blend it. It's all edible. You can even put your banana peels in your smoothie, seriously. But I would buy an organic banana if you did that. It's much easier with this little teaspoon. You see how easy that is? It takes time, but it's easy. So I'm gonna keep going with all of my zucchini, one after the next, after the next, after the next. When I have friends coming over for Shabbat, or whether it's new friends or old friends, I really, especially when it's someone that I've never cooked for before, I really like to get an idea of what do they like. Maybe I'll ask what their favorite dish is, maybe I've learned through conversation what things they do and don't like, and I try to incorporate that at my Shabbat table. A, it shows that you are listening and that you care, and I think that there's something so special about that. Or maybe you've gone out for dinner with this friend before and you notice that they ordered the cauliflower, and they say, Oh, I cannot resist anything with cauliflower. Having that intel also just helps you kind of formulate your menu so that you know that they'll like something. It's like when I make my son dinner. I'll always make something that I know he'll want to eat, and then I can try other things to add a little bit more variety to his diet. So, this friend of mine, like I mentioned, is obsessed with zucchini, and every time we go out, if there's zucchini, she's ordering it. She also loves cauliflower and anything with fish. So, zucchini it is for you, Sarah. When I host my Shabbat Club, we host it about every month-ish, depending on schedules. And I cook. A lot of the Shabbat clubs I see, they go to a restaurant and might rent it out, but I like to make it myself. I think it just there's nothing more welcoming and warm than a homemade meal. And so I have a questionnaire on there that asks everyone for allergies and intolerances. Very important. And then there's also a column for foods that they just don't like. I want to know if you hate cilantro, I want to know if you hate zucchini. It has this column for your favorite food and your favorite drink of choice. Oftentimes it's natural wine and diet coke, the perfect combination of natural and artificial, my two favorites as well. But when I see someone who says, you know what, I hate mushrooms and I was planning on serving mushrooms, maybe I rethink it. Or maybe I make sure that they have enough of the side dishes that they like that don't contain the items that they don't like. Or if they say, I hate mushrooms, but I love zucchini, maybe I make them this dish. People want to be asked. People don't want to feel like they have to put something on their plate. So if you ask them, they might have a little bit more comfort going to your home for Shabbat or for a meal than they did before because they'll know that you know what, even if I'm a picky eater, I can find something. It's always important to get that intel from whoever you're eating with. I think at least. Now, my husband hates zucchini. So he might not eat dinner with us. He or with us, he will, but maybe he won't eat the same thing. Maybe he'll eat one of the sides, and that's okay. Not everyone has to like everything at your table, and that is totally fine, but everyone should have something that they can eat. That is the ultimate rule. So if you know that one person is vegan, there should be at least one vegan dish that everyone can eat. You don't have to make your entire menu vegan, they will definitely appreciate it, and everyone will be able to enjoy it, but as long as they can eat one thing, you're probably good. I love this zucchini. I have so much zucchini to make my smoothies tomorrow. I really like zucchini in my smoothie actually because it's so mild and doesn't add color, so nobody you won't really think of it in there. Whenever I add greens and it's a vibrant green smoothie, you know it's full of veggies, even if it doesn't taste that way. But with a zucchini, less so. Okay. Keep going here. My favorite smoothie with a zucchini is uh about a half a pear, a half a banana, a big scoop of almond butter, vanilla protein powder, some almond milk, zucchini, sometimes spinach if I have it, and a little cinnamon. It's so easy. So easy, so delicious. And I like the pear to cut some of that banana sweetness. I can't stand when my smoothies just taste like bananas. Because while some people don't like zucchini or mushrooms, I don't like banana very much. I know it's crazy. I know I'm probably one of the few, but I'm not a big banana girly. Give me an eggplant or a mushroom, but banana? No, thank you. Alright, so all of my zucchinis are beautifully hollowed out. Look at that. Am I making a zucchini pyramid? Is this aggressive? Is this gonna topple all over? Absolutely. But it's I mean relatively light work. I did that pretty quickly, and then these are going to be nice and filled with my lentil and rice mixture. You can use sunflower seeds, sesame seeds. I ran out of sunflower seeds, so I'm using sesame today. There's a lot of flexibility when it comes to seeds. If you see a recipe that calls for, let's say, pumpkin seeds, you don't have any, but you do have chopped nuts or sunflower seeds, just sub them out in equal amounts. You're more than likely gonna be just fine. It's really just a textural and a flavor thing. I'm gonna put these in here for my smoothies and check the status of my online grocery order as well. Online groceries are kind of my savior these days. I use them all the time because I don't always have time to go out and get what I need. I'll freeze those and we'll come back once this has been 30 minutes. My herbs have arrived. Oopsies. So I've got dill and parsley. I love dill so much. It's probably one of my favorite herbs. Now you just really need a rough chop. Whenever you're making anything with fresh herbs, which if you can get fresh, that's always best. Don't be afraid to use those stems. The stems have just as much flavor as the leaves. It saves a bunch of time and it reduces your food waste. Perfect, so we'll get our herbs in here along with some olive oil. I saw Adina Sessman using this oil thing. So when I was in Tel Aviv, I bought the exact same one. When I go back in a month, I'll be buying a second one. About five tablespoons. Don't be shy. Stunning. That at least gave my rice and my lentils a little bit of time to really do its thing. I love the seasoning Baharat. There's it's a blend, and I mean every place that you'll get it will make their own unique combination. But there's cinnamon, ginger, cumin, coriander. It is such a nice way to impart a different flavor on this. If you don't have it or you can't find it, use your favorite seasoning blend. This would be amazing with Zatar or a Schwarmus spice seasoning or um an Ethiopian seasoning or a Persian. There's so many ways to take this. Or just like some oregano and really amp up those um fresh herbs in here. Up to you. Okay, so what we do now is we start to stuff. Save that three times fast. I'm gonna stuff in a big pot. First, I'm going to spread a little bit of this mixture on the bottom, and this is gonna kind of help to anchor our zucchini. Because if we were to just stuff it in here all pun intended, all on its own, it wouldn't really have any way to stand up. It would be a little bit too slippery. Now, what we do is start to stuff those zucchinis. So we have this ready to go, and I am going to use a smaller spoon to stuff my zucchinis as much as possible with that filling. All the liquid that we soaked this with, as well as the liquid from the zucchini and a little sauce we'll be making, will help to cook that rice and lentil mixture in our zucchini. So we'll be well cooked, perfectly cooked. So I like to make mine a little bit over the top. Don't I always? And then I'll stick them up like little shoulders in here. It's a little harder to do the first one, so I might even just wait until I have a couple stuffed before I put them in. Just because they rely on each other to stay up. So I'll keep filling these up. I'm hoping that my friend Sarah will record an episode with me. She is such a good friend. She doesn't live in the same place as I do. I live in the Chicago, Illinois area. Um, and she lives in New Jersey, and she owns a fabulous hala baking business. And she is coming for the weekend to come to Shabbat Club, which I'm so excited about. I've been to her house many times. She gets to meet Buckwheat, my dog, for the first time, and I'll get to show her around and we can eat delicious things and make hala together. So she's gonna come in especially for Shabbat Club. So we are going to make a special hala together, talk about what hala means to us, and why it's okay to buy a supermarket hala, or why it's okay to order hala and not make it on your own. Let's say that because she makes fabulous hala if you're in the States. So we'll be sure to link her below as well. But she'll join us to make hala for Shabbat Club, and I'll have some leftover zucchini for her. So we're just gonna stand these up. Let me do it on this side so it's a little easier to see. It's gonna get easier for them to stand the more we put in here, so don't worry. And then what happens is we make a quick sauce just with some more vegetable broth, tomato paste, a little bit more oil, and we will pour it over top and let it come to a boil and simmer. Simmer, simmer, simmer for a good chunk of time so that everything gets softened, and most importantly, the rice and lentils cook. If you find that your pot is a little bit too big and it's not really filling it as much as you want it to, that's no problem because it also depends on the size of your zucchini, right? We will have some leftover filling that will kind of distribute around the bottom that you can scoop out and eat, which is delicious. But you could also stuff some other vegetables if you wanted. You could stuff tomatoes, eggplant, even onion. And you can make any really stuffed vegetable in here. I might, if I have extra space, I might throw in a few baby potatoes on the bottom as well just to cook. Stuffed vegetables is a really nice way to use up some veggies that are softening in your fridge or have seen better days, if you know what I mean. And so I have some little baby potatoes in the cupboard, I'll grab to fill the rest of this up because these zucchinis were very petite, which is delicious, but small, you know? No problem at all. So I'll stuff this last one full to the brim of my rice and lentil mixture and put it in here. And I will just put a little bit more of this in here as well. So that they stand up a little bit straighter and a little bit neater. And while that's doing its thing, let's grab a couple little potatoes to put on the bottom. But life is all about figuring it out. So I have a sweet potato. I'm just gonna cube it. I'll keep that skin on and kind of just put this on the bottom in between some of my zucchinis, and that will fill it up really nicely. This one also had some unexpected sweetness, which I'm not mad about either. Beautiful. The best recipes are ones that you can play around with and still have success. Because it's not as if every time we make everything, the conditions will be perfect. You might not have enough time, you might not find all the ingredients you need, you might have a thousand and one things going on in your day, and you won't be able to do it exactly as written, and that is totally fine. You know what's actually perfect about this is because my husband doesn't like zucchini, he will eat the sweet potato and a lentil mixture on the bottom, and we'll eat the zucchini because we both love zucchini. So that's maybe this was actually Basher. This is meant to be that we that our pot was a little bit too big and our zucchini a little bit too small, and now my husband can eat too. Okay, let's put our the rest of our mixture on there. Amazing, and we'll make our sauce. So, our sauce couldn't be simpler, truly. It would be simpler if I remember where I put everything, but such as life. I've got veggie broth, some tomato paste, a little bit more oil, and salt. And then I'm just gonna give this a good little whisk. If you used a tomato can that was too big, like I did, you could also add the leftover canned tomatoes in here, which I'll do. I don't want to waste it. I'll often plan my Shabbat menu a good week in advance. I like to post it on my substack to give people ideas of what they could make. But a big part of how I get my inspiration for what I'm making is actually what's going bad in my fridge. So if I know that I have a half a cabbage that I needed for something earlier in the week, I want to use that up for Shabbat. So I really use Shabbat as a way to experiment and have fun and also reduce my food waste. So I'm not I'm not about to put this in there in the fridge to rot and be sad. So we'll use it here. So I'm gonna pour my sauce over top of my veggies. Get those delicious tomatoes right in there. There we go. Let's guy lost some of its filling, but that's okay. I'll just make sure everyone looks happy in here, as happy as a zucchini can be, I guess. And I'm gonna pop this on the stove and bring that liquid up to a boil, then simmer it with the lid on until that rice is softened. Beautiful. That's going. It's time for me to clean up. You relax, and I'll do that part. It has been 45-ish minutes since I put these stuffed zucchini on the stove, and a lot of the excess liquid has gone away. It was super liquidy before, and now it's relatively dry, it doesn't really move. Um, we see a little bit of caramelization from the natural sugars and the tomato on the corners. The zucchini is so tender, and taking a little piece of that rice, fully cooked. That means it's dinner time, and that means it's time for Shabbat. So let's see how we would plate these. You could certainly, especially if it was in a nice thing like this, you could certainly put this right on the table, no problem. Or you can serve people and have those plates passed around. I'm gonna show you what it looks like when we serve it. I like to serve it with a little bit of yogurt or lavne to cut through with some of that tinginess, a little bit of parsley on top, and a tiny bit of uh lemon juice as well. So let's get something to scoop these out. I'm so excited to have these for my friend. I think Sarah's really gonna love them. And honestly, I'm starting to think I should start putting sweet potatoes in here every time because I love the sweetness that it's adding. So let's get a couple of those out. My husband will love these sweet potatoes and also just adds a little extra color that we didn't necessarily have before. Stunning. I just got a whiff of that mint. Wow, that smells amazing. So dried mint's not something I typically have on hand, but what I always have on hand is a bag of. Dried mint leaves that I use for tea. So I just use that same exact mint tea as my dried mint in my cooking. I buy it in bulk because I go through a lot of mint tea and I use a French press to make it, and so I don't have to buy dried mint. You could absolutely use dried or sorry, fresh herbs in place of the mint, but you'd want to do about a quarter cup of mint leaves and fresh, I think for dill and parsley is gonna be much nicer. You won't exactly get like that freshness and lightness and springiness when you're using a dry version. Okay, let's choose let's choose some nice ones for her. So you can see that it is fully cooked, nice and tender, and it is stuffed to the brim with my rice and lentil mixture. So we'll add a few on here. Ooh, even that side mixture that kind of anchored all of our veggies in that I added the sweet potato to is looking stunning. So I'll put a couple like this. I like to maybe angle one on top. This one looks good. Okay. I can't help but lick my fingers because it tastes so bad. So look how stunning that is. First of all, piping hot. And it is such simple ingredients. We're not using anything fancy, but the time and care that we took to really stuff these zucchinis has paid off. That rice is so perfectly tender, and I love the little crunchiness from the sunflower or sesame seed. Sesame seed, which is what we used today, and then the lentils still get a little bit of that bite and chew. They're not mushy, there's so many textures going on here. Stunning. Okay, let's get some yogurt on here. Whatever brand you like best. If I had lavme in the fridge, you know I'd be adding that. Um, I just ran out because I use it so much. This is actually my son's yogurt, so it's a nice 5%, which I love for him. Okay, just a little dollop on top, like that. Add that to the side. And then my parsley. Beautiful, a little squeeze of lemon juice for freshness. This is such a perfect spring late winter dish, I think. A little bit of that lemon juice and a sprinkle of sprinkle or drizzle? Drizzle, olive, olive oil. The good stuff. This really highlights so much of the spring produce, but also just produce you can get all year round, which I love. And because Sarah has told me and has shown me over the years that zucchini is her absolute favorite veggie, I'm going to surprise her with a zucchini dish that I know she'll love that I've made especially for her. So no matter who's coming to your table, if you know one little thing that they like, maybe they love a chocolate chip cookie, maybe you know that they love a Pinot Noir, having that little extra something that to show them that you cared is such a great way to be a hostess with the most issue, truly. So she's gonna love this. We're gonna make the hulla together, I'll make a nice big salad, and we'll just enjoy, share stories, share wine, and just hang out together, which is really the best part about Shabbat. Something that we do at our house on Shabbat is we always share things that we're grateful for over the past week. So we've been doing this, my husband and I, we've been together almost 11 years. Yeah? So we've been probably doing this for over 10, I would say. And every week at the Shabbat table, we we ping-pong back and forth, something that we're each grateful for five times over the course of the week. Sometimes it's easier than other weeks. More often than not, I struggle to find that fifth one. But it's always nice for us to have a little moment to reflect and look at our week that we've had because sometimes there were really bright moments even in challenge in weeks. So this week I know I'll be grateful that Sarah is joining us for Shabbat, that we can have this Shabbat together and braid hala together and share that time together. And I'm grateful that you could join me on making Shabbat dinner this week. I don't want to ruin it. The tomatoes just like caramelize and become so rich. Taste in between the tomato paste and the crushed or the crushed tomatoes. That's so nice. I love the sweet potato in here. I'm gonna keep doing that. My husband might actually like this. I'll let you know. I love that. So simple, so good. Shabat shalom.