My grand mother had this wonderful way of making “farcis provencaux” or Provence style stuffed vegetables. This is a traditional summer preparation using the best of summer vegetables, stuffed with meat. Among the vegetables is the zucchini of course, and with it my grand mother would prepare tomatoes, potatoes and onions. What made hers special is the stuffing. Where a lot of people use sausage meat or just plain minced pork meat, my grand mother used a lot of more delicious things, and always non fatty meat: her stuffing is composed of grilled pork filet left over, ham, boneless pork cutlet… all minced together, and then she would add greens (see on the picture how green is the stuffing): tons of fresh parsley, the big green leaves of a lettuce, and finish with one egg, a bit of gratted gruyere, salt and pepper. Actually this base can also be used for cannelloni and hachis parmentier, two other preparations she was masterizing. I’ve seen her preparing that many times, she tought me and I’ve helped her many times too, but I can never reach that taste her stuffing for farcis had. But I keep trying. So this time I prepared stuffed zucchini, actually, usually she would use long zucchini, but I found these lovely round zucchini anc decided to try again, this won’t affect much the taste of the stuffing. So once the suffing is ready you just need to remove the seeds of the zucchini and stuff them, bake them in the oven for at least 90min. Farcis can be eaten hot or cold, you can keep them about 2 or 3 days in the fridge, and are always better the days after being cooked! Enjoy!
