Start Your Fritters with Cooked (Not Raw) Zucchini

You know as well as I how easy it is to get a little carried away when the zucchini come into season. This is true whether you pace the farmers market hopefully until they appear; whether you grow them in your backyard (in which case you really know what squash overload is like); whether you don't even like zucchini that much but overestimated at the store when picking up ingredients for zucchini bread.

They multiply, it seems, in the crisper drawer.

Take the leftover cooked zucchini from your latest barbecue or your fifth week of genius marinated zucchini in a row and turn it into fritters, as Ma'ayan Plaut did over on the (Not)Recipes app.

Ma'ayan Plaut almost 8 years ago

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Zucchini fritters made a new way (to me).

A friend recommended I steam and mash my zucchini before making fritter batter (I'm a grate-the-raw-zucchini then proceed person). I took the pre-cooked zucchini idea and applied it to post-cookout grilled zucchini, chopped into little pieces, and then added grilled onions (also chopped into little pieces), fresh basil, eggs, and buckwheat flour. I mixed all the ingredients together vigorously, since the no-gluten buckwheat flour lets you do that no problem, which incorporated some extra air into the batter too.

The result: tender thin fritters that cooked really quickly with an even more flavorful inside than I was expecting.

Today's dipping sauce was a sweet chili teriyaki - get all the last drops of sauce out of the sweet chili bottle by adding some soy sauce, water, and rice vinegar!

Ma'ayan borrowed the tip—to cook the zucchini before making fritters in order to eliminate some of the squash's moisture and achieve a crispier, sog-free fritter—from a friend, but translated it to leftover grilled zucchini she already had.

She chopped up the grilled zucchini then stirred it together with diced grilled onions, fresh basil, eggs, and buckwheat flour. The result? "Tender thin fritters that cooked really quickly with an even more flavorful inside than I was expecting," she writes in the post.

One more tip for using up leftovers, care of Ma'ayan: Make a sauce to dip the fritters in from the last drips of a bottle of sweet chili sauce by pouring soy sauce, water, and rice vinegar directly into the bottle and shaking it all together.

Do you have a tip for using up leftover zucchini? Share it in the comments.