Koussa Mahshiya - Stuffed Zucchini

January 27, 2004

It is around this time of the year in these parts that home gardeners become very generous. The plants they have been tending carefully suddenly start rewarding them. The cute tiny finger-sized zucchini take to hiding under the leaves and then burst forth as large mature vegetables.

Yesterday's baby seems to double in size every hour. In an effort to cope with the glut, the home gardener takes his supermarket bags out to his plot and starts filling them up for his "mates at work‚". He tries hiding them from his wife as he can't face another zucchini meal.

As The Spouse is not a gardener, he doesn't have to cope with a zucchini glut. He still likes the vegetable and so, on the way home for a week out of town playing lawn bowls, he stopped at a roadside stall and bought a nice large bag of zucchinis. He also picked up a box of vine ripened tomatoes. The two go very well together so I thumbed through a couple of cookbooks for some culinary inspiration that included both.

I didn't have to go much further than Rosemary Macdonald's Arabic Cookery (ISBN 0-572-02145-3) where I found three recipes that I combined for today's dish, Koussa Mahshiya or Stuffed Zucchini. Macdonald recommends choosing zucchini that are the same size, removing the stem end then taking out the central flesh with an apple corer, taking care not to cut the skin. Because I was using medium-sized zucchini, I removed both ends and cut each in half horizontally, which made for easier filling.

For the filling I chose Moukh Hamal or Turkish stuffing and then made a batch of Dukkous Al-Tamat - tomato sauce - to complete the dish.

Moukh Hamal

175g minced lamb
2 tomatoes, chopped
salt and pepper
100g (1 cup) grated cheddar

Saute the meat until browned then add the tomatoes, salt and pepper. When the mixture is cool, add the cheese and mix well together.

Dukkous Al-Tamat

1 large onion, chopped
15ml olive oil
4 tomatoes, skinned and chopped
2 garlic cloves
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
salt and pepper
1 1/4 cups water

Saute the onion in olive oil until transparent. Add the remaining ingredients and simmer for 15 minutes. The sauce may be pureed. (I pureed it lightly using a wand-style blender, but leaving the sauce still a little chunky).

Koussa Mahshiya

Fill the zucchini with the meat stuffing and lay the filled vegetables in a large pan. Pour over the tomato sauce to just cover them. Simmer gently for an hour until the zucchini are soft and the filling cooked. A little chopped mint may be added at the end of cooking.

I baked mine uncovered in the oven.

There are various other fillings that can be used - lamb and rice, lamb and chickpeas, tomato and rice, tomato and burghul, meat, spice and pine nuts. The above filling and sauce can also be used to prepare stuffed peppers or stuffed eggplant.