ZUCCHINI and TOMATO SAUCE

For pasta, rice or noodles

This zucchini and tomato sauce is amazing. You take a couple of vegetables, sauté them in some olive oil with garlic and when served with pasta, rice or noodles you have a meal. It is really that simple. And quick. In a half hour you have dinner ready to serve.

Why try this recipe?

This recipe checks all the boxes. There are only 2 main ingredients that you can get anywhere anytime. It’s meatless and affordable. Your dinner is done in 30 minutes and there’s not a lot of clean up. What else could you ask for?

Beware the backyard gardener

More and more of us are trying our hand at gardening vegetables these days and whether you are new to gardening or not, tomatoes and zucchini are gardening favorites. Why? They are easy to grow and they are very bountiful.

Gardeners often reap so many tomatoes and zucchini that they can’t use them all, so they generously share with family, friends and neighbors.

But, before the season is over the generous gardener often runs out of people willing to take their excess bounty and some go to great lengths to rid themselves of some of it.

This could happen to you

A gardener friend, or even acquaintance of yours has just stopped over for an unexpected visit. Without you knowing, they have smuggled in a disguised bag of tomatoes and zucchinis. When your visitor leaves, the bag has been left behind. 🙄 Yes, you are the victim of a gardener ditching produce! 🤭

While wondering what you are going to do with the discarded bounty, hopefully you will remember this recipe. It is perfect as a main course or a side dish for lunch, brunch or dinner. It is light and fresh.

No gardeners in your life?

Well, even if your tomatoes and zucchini are not free, this recipe is very economical especially during the growing season.

An all vegetable sauce

I would not be considered a vegetable lover but I know their importance in healthy eating, so I am always glad to find a vegetable dish that I really like. And I really like this recipe.

I especially like using fresh plum tomatoes to make a tomato sauce. Our FRESH TOMATO SAUCE also made with fresh plum tomatoes is another great sauce that is absolutely delicious. Watching tomatoes morph into a sauce brings me a sense of accomplishment for very little work.

Here’s what YOU WILL NEED:

About the ingredients

Tomatoes

Regular round eating tomatoes are not a good substitute for plum tomatoes in this recipe. You need the firmer flesh that the plum tomato has. They also have less seeds.

Basil

Fresh basil is your best bet in this sauce. The flavors of tomato and zucchini are mild. Fresh basil brings brightness to this sauce. Fresh basil leaves are very mild so you don’t have to count out your basil leaves. A few leaves more or less don’t make much of a difference.

On the other hand dried basil has a deep strong flavor. It doesn’t take much to overpower the sauce if you are too generous with it.

Fresh basil in season is a lot less expensive than other times of the year. And what you don’t use for this recipe you can keep in a vase or glass of water for a couple of weeks so you can use it in another recipe. Or you can dry or freeze the basil leaves for later in the year. Check out more on using fresh herbs and preserving them in Cooking with Herb, It’s Drying Time Again and Back Porch Herb Garden.

Garlic

This recipe calls for 5 cloves of fresh garlic. Garlic is a personal preference ingredient. The sauce starts as a classic combination of oil and garlic. How much garlic you want to use is up to you. You can make this sauce without garlic if you want. It’s just an additional flavor.

In our post All About Garlic we recognize that there is no easy way to define how much garlic you should use in any recipe. There are some huge heads of garlic out there with huge cloves. Five of those big cloves would turn off even an avid garlic lover like myself.

Olive oil

This tomato and zucchini sauce starts as a basic olive oil and garlic sauce. Olive oil is a key ingredient. Using another oil as a substitute will change the flavor and quality. You don’t need the most expensive olive oil for a warm olive oil sauce.

Olive oil is a great investment. It is one of the healthiest oils there is. You can improve the nutritional value of anything you are making by using olive oil. It is very versatile. It is most often called for in savory dishes but there are wonderful cake recipes out there that use olive oil too.

Great with grated parmesan

Grated parmesan cheese is a perfect addition to this simple recipe. The flavors in the sauce are so mild, the salty richness of parmesan cheese really shines through.

Freshly grated cheese from a block is always the best. But refrigerated grated or shredded cheese is second best.

This is WHAT TO DO:

Wash the tomatoes and the zucchini

Wash the tomatoes and zucchini before chopping. We are using them with the skin on. Without washing first, what is on the skin is going to be in your sauce. We have written a post about this: Wash Before You Eat. It’s a lighthearted reminder that the vegetables on our dinner plate have traveled a long and germ ridden journey. To get the grimy bacteria ridden stuff off your fruits and vegetables all you have to do is rinse them well in warm water and wipe them off. It’s easy enough.

Chop

If you are going to be mixing your sauce in with rice, you may want to use smaller slices of zucchini. Just cut your slices in half while they are still on the chopping block.

Chopping the zucchini

Here are a few tips about chopping the zucchini for this recipe. The same method can be used to cut any vegetable that is round. It will make the task of slicing or chopping much easier.

You don’t want a vegetable rolling around while you are trying to cut it. Always cut off the widest end to make a flat cut area that you can lay down on the cutting surface.

For our zucchini, first cut the top and bottom off.

Because one end is thicker than the other on this zucchini, I made another cut between the thinner and thicker ends. Now I have a flat surface to put down on the cutting board to cut the zucchini in half, down the middle from top to bottom.

Then I cut slices from each half. I cut thicker slices from the thinner halves and thinner slices on the fatter halves to try to get the pieces relatively uniform size so they are done at the same time.

When the chopping is done, so is most of the work.

Time to cook

Time your pasta, rice or noodles

You are only about 20 minutes away from your sauce being done at this point. Think about how long your pasta, rice or noodles are going to take and start it accordingly.

Tip:

Often I am making this sauce in the warmer months. Boiling water can quickly heat up a house. My way to mitigate heating up my kitchen is to use a fresh pasta from the refrigerated case of the grocery store.

Fresh pasta cooks up in 2 to 6 minutes depending on what type of pasta you get.

Sauté the garlic

NOTE: You need to stay at the stove and move your ingredients around in the pan while you are sautéing. If medium high heat is causing your ingredients to brown, turn the heat down. Medium heat does the same job. You basically just want to flavor the oil with the garlic and steam the water out of the zucchini.

Sauté the zucchini

Still on medium high heat, add the chopped zucchini. When the zucchini has come up to temperature in the skillet, there should be lots of steam. The water in the zucchini is evaporating. Keep that steam going for 3-5 minutes, stirring constantly until the white “flesh” starts turning translucent. The pictures will show how the zucchini steams from white and firm, to a more tender light translucent yellowish green.

You don’t need it fully cooked. You just want to get some of the moisture out.

The metamorphosis from vegetables to sauce

As you work with different ingredients and recipes, you start to recognize the morphing of the ingredients into a finished product. With practice you will know when your dish is done by the way it looks. That’s why we include pictures for each stage of preparation and cooking. I hope they help you to know what to look for when you are making our recipes and in your everyday cooking.

Using your eyes or a tooth test for doneness is a much more reliable way to determine when your dish is done than any given cook time. There are so many variables that can effect cook time, such as the burner heat and the size of the vegetable chop.

Watch it come together

Add the chopped tomatoes, basil, salt and pepper to the skillet with your sautéed zucchini and mix it all together.

On medium high heat the tomatoes are going to start cooking down pretty quickly. When the rendered tomato juice and olive oil comes to a boil, let it boil for 3 minutes still stirring it while it is cooking.

Then, turn the heat down and simmer UNCOVERED for 20 minutes. It is important to leave the skillet uncovered.

Because you are simmering in an uncovered skillet, you may need to have your stove set higher than the simmer mark on your temperature dial to keep the mixture at a simmer. You are looking for small bubbles to be popping up here and there consistently during simmering. There should be steam coming from the skillet during the entire cook time.

Here’s our zucchini and tomato sauce in the making.

With my “trained” eye (meaning I have been doing this a long time) I know my sauce is done when I see that the tomatoes have melted down into the olive oil and become a sauce. The colors, like the flavors have melded together and its all a lot lighter in color.

Mix in your starch

Serve