If you are a mom like me, one of your raison d’être when cooking is to find some healthy meals your kids will accept to eat. Better, will WANT to eat and ASK for MORE.

Well my kids are not picky, but they LOVE this appetizer. And let’s be honest, zucchini is not always popular in our house. So… who knew they would ask for zucchini ?

The secret is the egg and parsley sauce. Mix a few steamed eggs with olive oil and parsley and a touch of mustard aioli/ dijon mustard, blend, cover the steamed zucchini. And of course, both eggs and zucchini are steamed within 4 to 8 minutes. The result is an appetizer that looks like a long green boat with green and yellow sauce on top ! The result? Your kids get 2 to 3 servings of vegetables in one appetizer, and wants more… The bonus? They get a ton of vitamin C and calcium in the parsley sauce!

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How Do I Get My Kids to Like Zucchini?

Zucchini is one of these delicate vegetables that are very tasty when they are small and crunchy, but get very bitter if they are too big, too old, too cooked and mushy. So here are a few hints: it depends on how you chose them and how you cook them.

How do I chose zucchini?

Liking zucchini is not so much about how you pick zucchini themselves, although it’s part of it. How I pick them applies to how I chose all my vegetables.

How Do I Chose Any Vegetable?

First principle; in the USA, you can find them all the time. Try to buy them in season ( spring summer), they will likely be more fresh even in conventional grocery stores.

A good hint a vegetable is in season: 1) you can find both the non organic and the organic version at the store; 2) It comes from the same hemisphere. So stay away from Australia, South America… My personal preference: supporting local farmers at the farmer’s market. Why? Well first, economical common sense for one, I prefer supporting local businesses, and second, even if not organic, it probably was picked just a few days ago, so it ripened on the plant and as a consequence, it is substantially more nutrient dense.

YES, if you pick a fruit or vegetables too early from the tree, it can still ripen slowly in and out fridges ( look at bananas, and other fruits ripening/ rotting in your bowls), but it no longer pulls nutrients from the ground. So, ask yourself, is it likely to have as much nutrient density as a vegetables your local farmer grew?

Produce is expensive, and our health needs demands we eat as much as we can: the fibers, plant hormones, vitamins, trace minerals and prebiotics that feed out gut good bacteria are in there to fuel our health! So we might as well get them locally if we can.

Picking Zucchini

Back in France, I used to like zucchini, but when I came here, I found them tasteless and bitter. Thankfully someone told me I was simply not picking them right: you need them small, not full of water, to have a more intense, less bitter taste. Most vitamins are in the skin, right? So by buying smaller zucchini you get more skin surface and therefore, more vitamins. Win-win !

Buy them fresh and in season: they will be less old, less bitter! If they are old, you can take some of the bitter water away by salting them and letting them spit their juice before cooking them. That’s what my mom would do if zucchini had waited for too long.

How Do I Cook Zucchini?

Zucchini is a bit like asparagus: if you cook it too long, they are mushy and not fun to eat. Find the magic of cooking them just the right amount of time.

I confess I grew up with my Vitaliseur steam cooker so I wouldn’t know how to boil it. But I know how I steam it. The length depends on how thick you cut the vegetable: I usually cut it in 1/3 to 1/2 inch size for 4 minutes in the sieve of my steam cooker. They get out of there still crunchy, no bitterness at all, quite pleasant to eat with whatever else you want. It i cut them lengthwise, I also cook them 4 minutes and it’s perfect.

So I tend to agree with my kids: Over 4 minutes of steaming and zucchini are no longer good to my tastebuds.

By the way, want a delicious recipe with zucchini? Try my Zuchini and Leek soup ! Perfect winter dinner appetizer!

Getting Over the “Get Calcium From Milk” Hump

Now what do parsley and milk have in common? They are rich in CALCIUM!

The “Get Calcium From Milk” Hump

Growing up we developed some sensitivity to milk. At the time the common wisdom was still that we needed dairy to get calcium. Since then we discovered why doctors recommend milk: Yes milk does have a lot of nutrients, including calcium, therefore a bit goes a long way to get people nourished as opposed to malnourished. But this recommendation is only good if you are poor and milk is one of the only food you get: it’s a very nutrient dense food!

The problem is: woudn’t there be a danger that having milk as a backup nutritional insurance also becomes the excuse to get milk while making poor nutritional choices for the rest of our foods?

New Dairy Manufacturing Practices That Hurt Digestion

Besides, since the focus on calcium became the center of pediatric nutritional advice, not only has the industry changed the way cows are raised and fed, they started ultra pasteurizing it milk, which means you wouldn’t get the bacteria helping humans with milk digestion.

They also homogenized it, which means you wouldn’t be able to separate the fattest part the milk as people used to. For example, in my small experience growing up, we would get raw milk at the local farm, then boil it and remove the thickest part which contains most of the growth factors baby cows need to grow into the enormous and fat animals they are as adults – and which, side note, we humans do not resemble as adults.

From my reading over the years, I understand that the milk fat is the main location of the growth factors that arguably we humans did not consume in the past, and that we now are forced to consume through the process of homogenization. The question remains: would as many people be sensitive to dairy if it had remained fed as nature planned it, unpasteurized and was not homogenized? I don’t know. I just know my own digestion of cow’s dairy product was not optimal.

Getting Calcium When One Can’t Have Milk

Now another one on calcium and milk: there may be a lot of calcium in dairy milk which is absorbed at a rate of 30% ( where does the rest go??) , but there is also a lot, and more, of highly absorbable calcium in produce: at a rate of 50 percent for green leafy vegetables, in the 20-30% for beans %. It just takes eating more of it and preparing it, of course. But what if it was not as difficult to prepare as we think?

A Diversified Diet Not Focused On Dairy

Beside the obvious financial problem of procuring all the produce we need that contain calcium ( and many more nutrients too) , consider the advantage of diversifying your diet to make sure not only calcium gets in, but all other things? That’s one of the reason I am happy our diet does not focus on dairy, even if we allow a space for it – mostly ideally long fermented hard cheeses from smaller animals like sheep and goat, because their milk composition is closer to the one in human milk, so assumedly it is more adapted than cow’s milk.

In vegetables, you get MANY types of nutrients: vitamins, trace minerals ( including calcium, magnesium, potassium), plant hormones, prebiotic fibers… It is alkalizing which means it keeps your acid-base body balance in check. It is all the more beneficial to your health that you cook it in a way that preserves the nutrients, like gentle steam cooking like I do!

Coming back to the topic of how to get calcium on a plant-focused diet ( as opposed to plant-only-based diet), studies show that the most calcium containing produce are leafy vegetables. And one easy way, low budget way to get a little more leafy vegetables is to make them into dips! That’s what my mom started doing and with her genius, it worked.

The Nutritional Genius of Parsley

Who thinks of using parsley in bulk? My mom did !

How did we come to the parsley sauce idea?

When my mom discovered that one of the leafy vegetable that contains the highest amount of calcium was parsley she put her creative mind to work! Of course more data has been published since and sesame seeds are also a great option and also easier to use in your daily cooking in the form of tahini for example. But just have a look at this article and this data on parsley, and you will be amazed at how much you can get from a sauce with one or two bunches parsley! If the amount of calcium does not convince you ( remember parsley isn’t the only food you would eat in one day that contains calcium) , look at the amount of vitamin C for example…

My mom knew this rougher type of vegetable would be harder to insert into dishes in high concentration, and what has a higher concentration in a ingredient than a sauce? So she started blending it in a sauce, like others would do in a smoothie! She mixed up sweet and green, olive oil, lemon, armed us with a carrot or two and let us dip taste it. A real win! I will post the recipe for you soon, promise!

The other ingredient I always found parsley paired well with blended was eggs! Hence the zucchini boat recipe!

What you need to make the steamed zucchini and eggs boats

• A Vitaliseur steam cooker, as usual. Use my code “steamedcuisine” and save at check out ! ( I recommend the Grand Chef pack with the soup bowl! I use it a lot)
• My other ally to speed cook with 5 kids: a large thermos ! Heat your water only once and keep the rest warm for the rest of the day. Since the electronic kettle is power intensive, I can at least keep the water hot longer, which is great to warm up the steam cooker faster, but also for pasta water, tea, and hot chocolate…
• Good knife to cut vegetables;
• A good food processor like the Cuisinart that I use ;
• A well stocked pantry: a good extra virgin olive oil, sea salt, Trader Joe’s Mustard Aioli dijon mustard.

And now to the recipe: