Kousa Mehshi (stuffed zucchini) Recipe

This is another comfort food meal for me. It is warm, nourishing, and tastes like my childhood. I remember asking my parents to pack this for my school lunch as a kid but they just laughed and packed me a turkey sandwich. The recipe uses Lebanese or Magda squash that is hollowed out and stuffed with ground beef, rice, peppers, tomatoes, and herbs and cooked in a light tomato broth finished with some dried mint. I don’t normally use any specialized equipment when cooking but a zucchini corer will save you a lot of time and hassle here. The filling is super easy to make so the bulk of the work here is just coring the zucchini. Growing up, my family would sit around the dining table coring zucchini while catching up with one another. I’ve come to realize that a lot of my family recipes are built around gathering and communal work. A bonus for this recipe is that nothing goes to waste. You can use the leftover zucchini insides for another dish called mfarakeh, that I will write about in another post.

Ingredients:

For the zucchini:

• 20 medium sized Lebanese or Magda zucchinis

For the zucchini stuffing:

• 1/2 cup short-grain rice (washed)

• 1 lb ground beef

• 1 medium tomato (finely diced)

• 1 cubanelle pepper (finely diced)

• 1/2 tsp tomato paste

• 1/2 tsp salt

• 1/4 pepper

• red chili pepper flakes (optional pinch)

• 1/4 cup water

For the sauce:

• 1/2 tsp salt

• 1/4 pepper

• 4 medium tomatoes (roughly chopped)

• 6-8 cloves of garlic (mashed with a mortar and pestle)

• 2 cups of warm water

• 2 lemons (juiced)

• 1/2 tsp dried mint

Recipe:

• Core all the zucchinis. Set aside the cores for a different recipe.

• Mix all of the zucchini stuffing ingredients together and stuff each zucchini.

• Line up all of the zucchinis in a medium-large sized pot where all of the zucchini can fit next to one another vertically with the stuffing-side facing up. Add the tomatoes and garlic to the pot. Dissolve the tomato paste into the warm water and add that to the pot.

• Cook the zucchini on low-medium heat covered for one hour.

• Add lemon juice and cook for an additional five minutes covered.

• Turn the heat off and add dried mint. Enjoy!