Zucchini Casserole

Where I live lots of people grow zucchini in their gardens.  I don't do a garden, but I had a friend give me two large zucchinis from her garden.  I decided to cook it up in a casserole.  Here is the recipe  I made up myself.

2 good sized zucchinis cubed, (about 4 cups)
1 can cream of celery soup
1/4 cup sour cream
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 cup chopped onion
1 small package stuffing mix, prepared according to package instructions.

Cut zucchini into bite sized pieces. Boil or steam until tender but not mushy. Saute the onions in the oil until they are translucent. Mix the soup, sour cream, onion and zucchini plus 1/2 cup of the stuffing together and put in a casserole dish.  Top with the rest of the stuffing.  Cover and bake for 1/2 hour at 350 degrees.  Remove the lid and bake another 10 minutes to brown the stuffing topping.

Lowfat Vegan version

Substitue simple white sauce for cream of celery soup. Cut out the sour cream and make the stuffing mix without added fat.  

Note, I tried this with the addition of 1/4 cup sun-dried tomatoes mixed in and I like it. 

End of the Summer

It is the end of August and the end of the summer.  It is time to evaluate how my vegetarian experiment went.  Over all it turned out to not be very hard to live a loosely vegetarian life style.  Once I got a core set of recipes, it was pretty easy to come up with tasty dinners.  A few recipes I tried were failures, but hey, that was bound to happen.  I wasn't terribly strict with my resolve either.  If I was at a restaurant, or visiting at someone's house, I just ate what was given to me. Maybe being strictly vegetarian would be harder.

So, did I notice any benefit to being a vegetarian?  I didn't really notice any improvement to my health.  I didn't lose weight or gain energy or anything.  My food bill went down.  I think we were spending maybe $50-$100 less on food a month.  The main thing I liked about the whole experience was the sense of non-harming.  It just seems good not to take another animal's life to support my own if I don't have to. 

Going forward, my husband and I have decided to start eating meat again, but not as much as we did before.  We were thinking maybe 70 % vegetarian, or one or two meals a week with meat. Since we are still going to be cooking a lot of vegetarian food, I will keep adding recipes as I try new ones.