Fries go low-carb in this recipe for oven-baked zucchini strips.
I'm going to preheat the oven, way up as high as it goes. You wanted it about 500 that’s going to be for the zucchini. Grab a little pan to get my zucchini on I've got two medium size zucchini here, you do not want to use a really large zucchini for this zucchini oven fries they're going to be too wet too much water content in a really big zucchini. And you grab from fresh herbs to work with and some spicy brown mustard while I'm back here. Let’s see I need a couple of little bowls, make in Mexican food so I definitely need some jalapeños.
Out of the pantry I need some grill seasoning. Little ground cumin, some oregano I need that red wine vinegar too, let me grab that. Okay, all this down. I think I’ll start with my zucchini I want to get that in the oven. Now, I saw a report on raw food cooking have you seen this, it’s where no food goes above a 118 degrees. And the guy had his version of a burger and fries. And the fries we’re actually kind of a dehydrated zucchini and I'm still cooking my food. This is one trend I haven't played around too much with yet the raw food thing but I thought “Oh, zucchini I love breaded zucchini. Why not try roasting the zucchini and you know give it the appearance of french fry kind of a thing”.
So I played around with it a bit and this is what I came up with. It’s not going to taste like a potato but it’s so tasty. And I served it up with a little sauce, chilli sauce or taco sauce. So it looks like a fry and it’s so tasty you really don’t miss the whole potato thing. I'm scrapping out the seed because I want to get rid of as much moisture as possible. See what I mean when you get a medium size zucchini there's not a lot of scrapping going on, there's not a lot of it.
The more seeds the wetter this would be and you don’t want it to be wet. So if we get in the oven nice and hot too, you don’t want to sweat the vegetable. Okay, I'm going to drizzle a little bit of oil, EVOO on to my cookie sheet here just a touch. Because I don’t want the zucchini to soak up a lot of oil, so I know that’s all that’s going to go on this zucchini if I put it on the sheet pan first. Now I'm just cutting long strips here, go to the full length of the zucchini. And you can make them as thick or as thin as you like your fries.
I got kind of a medium cut going on here. You know a lot of my friends, it thought this was just going to be a fad this whole low carb thing but a lot of my friends have been literally doing this for years. The Atkins or the Zone, so I find that I have to write more and more of this recipes, you got to keep coming up with them because this is one trend but its not going away. And I get three cuts out of that, see now you’ve quite a pile of zucchini there.
You put it on here and get it coated, toss it for a minute because you do want a little bit of oil on each one of the pieces of zucchini and then you want to spread it out. So it will take the seasonings. So you're hitting all of the zucchini with your seasoning. Okay, now we’re going to move on to the seasoning blend. Just grab little map thing and wipe that off. Okay, super simple you can change this up and put together your favorite blend of spices. This is what I was thinking. Some ground cumin makes it nice and smoky and we’ve had about a tablespoon of each of these items in a bowl and mix them together.
I've got my nice smoky cumin which is spicy but not hot. If you like chilly you're going to like cumin. If you like Mexican food you're going to love ground cumin. I'm going to add some grill seasoning that’s coarse salt and coarse black pepper. It’s got some crushed red paper flake in there. It also has a little onion and garlic. I love that. Any brand is fine. And I'm going to add a little oregano in there, nice dried Mexican oregano. Crushed that all up, toss it together with your finger tips. And then sprinkle it evenly down over your zucchini. See perfect and that one tablespoon of each really works out great if you’ve got two medium zucchini its kind of just the right amount.
We’re going to pop this into the oven and get it working. And now that is a side dish that we prepared in what three or four minutes, excellent. Remember we cooked this at 500 degrees, did fast work in there and we grab some chilli sauce because that the condiment I want to use with this. I've just got the grill seasoning and the smoky cumin on there and a little bit of oregano. And I've got a terrific side dish of chilli sauce to spoon down over that so it looks like fries and ketchup get it?
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