



I consider zucchini to be the “Swiss Army Knife” of summer vegetables since there are so many different ways to prepare it – both as a main course as well as a side dish. Though fresh zucchinis can be had year round in most locales, it’s at its best during the summer months. I’m a big believer in the strategy of consuming fruits and vegetables when they’re in season. Zucchini also are easy to grow in backyard gardens provided you have sufficient space to let the vines roam. The following recipe is just one of many ways to prepare a healthy and tasty side dish using zucchini.
Though this recipe won’t make you forget McDonald’s fries, it will hopefully begin to gently lead you towards a path of choosing healthier and lower carb side dishes. There are quite a few recipes out there for zucchini fries, but I’ve found them to still be a little too heavy on the starchy carbs for my liking. Most use flour and breadcrumbs to provide a crispy coating to the fries. This is great, but through a little experimenting, I’ve managed to come up with something just as good that doesn’t add to the glycemic load of the recipe and is also much simpler to prepare since it eliminates a few extra steps. The other recipes require that you first dredge the zucchini strips in flour and then dunk them into egg before another dredging operation into breadcrumbs. We’re gonna skip all that and get right into cooking up some zucchini fries!
It’s Officially Zucchini Season 2015!
With zucchini’s popping out in gardens all over now that it’s summer, why not take advantage of all the great ways to enjoy them? Besides this fantastic low-carb baked zucchini fries recipe, there’s also zoodles. In the video below, I demonstrate how to use a simple Vegetti slicer to make oodles of zoodles! It also includes a delicious recipe for combining them with a low-carb version of Chicken Parmesan.
Servings: 2
Ingredients:
- 1 medium size zucchini
- ½ C Parmesan cheese
- 3 Tbsp Extra virgin olive oil
- ½ tsp Salt
- ½ tsp Ground pepper
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 350F
- Peel the zucchini with a potato peeler and cut into strips ¼” thick and about 3” long
- Pour 2 Tbsp of olive oil into a glass baking dish and dump the “fries” into it. Lightly toss the fries until well-coated with olive oil.
- Dump Parmesan cheese, salt, and pepper onto a plate and sift together using a fork.
- Place several fries at a time into the Parmesan cheese mixture. Roll the zucchini strips over several times in the mixture making sure that they are thoroughly coated on both sides with cheese.
- Place the zucchini strips in uniform rows on the cookie sheet. You don’t need much spacing between them, but you may need a second cookie sheet depending on how many fries you wound up with.
- Sprinkle the remaining olive oil using a metal soup spoon evenly over the tops of the fries.
- Bake the fries for 10 minutes and then remove from the oven. Carefully flip them over using a spatula and then place back into the oven for another 10 minutes or until well-browned.
- Remove fries from oven and server immediately – either as a side dish or as an appetizer with one of the aforementioned dipping sauces.
Do you have nutritional information for this recipe? Can hardly wait to try it tonight! Thank YOU!
Hi Teri, thanks for stopping by! Yes, I need to go back and add nutritional info for some of the older recipes. Thanks for the reminder! I’ll get to it before the weekend is out.
Curious if you’ve tried making Zoodles from zucchini? It’s something I’ve started doing recently and have fallen in love with them. They’re a great low-carb substitute for wherever you’d typically use pasta.
-Rich
Nutrition info is posted! My apologies for finally getting around to it. As you can see, this is a very low-carb side dish or appetizer. Please let me know how it turned out for you.
-Rich