Nonna Angela's Stuffed Zucchini
My nonna on my mother’s side used to make these. Nonna Angela could speak two languages
– London and Piedmontese – and she wasn’t very good at either English or Italian. Every region
in Italy has its own dialect, which changes from town to town and sometimes even from village
to village, and my nonna came from Ivrea in Piedmont.
This is one of those dishes you can prepare in advance and then warm through. Or you can
eat the courgettes cold the next day as part of a picnic as they are finger food too and this works
well as an al fresco dish. I use long courgettes for this recipe, not round, even though the shape
of the round ones makes them easier to stuff. The recipe calls for long ones, and I’m a real
traditionalist – a trait shared by many Italians. It means we keep all our traditions and varieties
and pass them down to the next generation, but we’re therefore not keen to change recipes.
I would die before I stuck Cheddar on pasta, for example, despite it being one of the best
cooking cheeses in the world, but I’d rather have no cheese on my pasta than something other
than what that particular recipe requires (and no cheese of any sort on pasta with seafood!).
You can drizzle olive oil flavoured with fresh lemons over the top of the filling to help the
mixture stay moist, and olives or capers also work really well in the filling. Serves 4
Ingredients:
200 g ricotta cheese
1 onion, chopped
185 g canned tuna
salt and freshly ground black pepper
freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to taste
4 long medium courgettes (not marrows)
Preheat the oven to Gas Mark 3/170°C.
Mix together the ricotta, onion and tuna, season and add grated Parmesan to taste.
Cut a small piece of skin from the straightest side of each courgette, so that they will sit
better in the baking tray. Then cut a ‘V’ shape from the top of each courgette and heap the filling
mixture into it. Place the piece that you cut out on top of the filling to help stop it drying out.
Put the stuffed courgettes in a baking tray and bake in the oven for about 30 minutes, until
the courgettes are cooked through – if a skewer will push cleanly through a courgette, they are done.
*taken from the book ‘From Seed to plate’ by Paolo Arrigo, published by Simon and Schuster