I went through Oven Hell today– possibly to be detailed later in this blog post– and have authoritatively determined that my oven has not the slightest idea what three hundred and fifty degrees is, nor does it understand that there are temperatures between 350 and 400 degrees. Yes, those things are both true at the same time; be patient.

I experimented for dinner tonight, and it actually worked out, for the most part, which I’m probably prouder of than I have any reason to. This was basically off-book entirely; a Facebook friend got a bunch of zucchini through a CSA and posted a call for zucchini recipes; I contributed the zucchini risotto recipe I’ve used before and then another of her friends suggested stuffing it with quinoa and goat cheese. He gave me a few details and I ran with it. This is what happened:

Stuffed Zucchini with Quinoa, Goat Cheese, and Tomato Sauce:

The first step is to cook the quinoa. Quinoa basically cooks like rice; boil two cups of water, then pour a cup of quinoa into it, reduce the heat, cover, and leave it alone for 12-15 minutes or so, checking on it a bit toward the end to make sure you don’t burn it. Pull it from the heat when it looks done (again, pretend you’re making rice,) fluff it with a fork, and get it off the heat to mind its own business while you deal with the zucchini. Oh, also: RINSE THE QUINOA FIRST, unless you have the kind that says you don’t have to, in which case do it anyway because they might be wrong. Quinoa is insanely bitter if you don’t rinse it off first.

I used two zucchini. Cut the stems off, cut them in half the long way, and use a spoon to pull the seeds out, hollowing the center of each half out. I would suggest doing some scraping on the inside afterwards, too, to try and get the flesh of the zucchini a little thinner, then chop the crap out of everything until the pieces are super small. I put everything into a 9×13 glass pan, so I had to trim the ends a bit to get them to fit, but otherwise that size was about perfect. This takes about five to seven minutes, which is how long the quinoa needs to rest, which is perfect. Mix up the quinoa with the zucchini seeds and whatever flesh you managed to scrape out and add half of your goat cheese. Now, unfortunately, my containers are in the recycling bin already so I don’t know exactly how much goat cheese I used, but I had two containers, both of which were four bucks or so at my slightly-overpriced local supermarket. I think they were four-ounce containers but don’t hold me to that. So let’s say four ounces of goat cheese mixed in. Pile the mixture into the zucchini and then, after spraying the glass pan with something non-stick (note: this may not be necessary) put the rest of the zucchini/quinoa/goat cheese mixture into the pan and spread it out so it’s even. Put the four stuffed zucchini halves on top.

Pour the entire contents of a jar of tomato sauce on top. I used roasted pepper and garlic spaghetti sauce because that was what I had in the house; do what you like. Dump the other container of goat cheese on top of that and cover with foil. (This step may also be unnecessary, but in doing some minor research, every recipe for stuffed zucchini said to cover the dish with foil before it went into the oven. It certainly didn’t seem to hurt anything.)

Here’s the tricky part: I’m not sure how long to cook it. My oven sucks; I set it at 375, which according to the oven thermometer I put inside actually produced 350 degrees. I baked everything for twenty minutes and Bek and I both felt that the outer part of the zucchini was too tough. Note that we ate them anyway; if slightly-crunchy zucchini doesn’t bug you, this should be enough, but I jacked the temperature up to 400 degrees and put the other two back in while we finished the first half. I think 30 minutes at 400 degrees or a bit longer at 350 would probably sufficiently soften the shells, but this bit really depends on your oven. The good news is that so long as the quinoa is cooked you can basically eat this raw if you want to; it’s not like there’s anything in there that is dangerous uncooked; it’s just got a chance of being wonky on the texture front.

Interesting note: I was unaware that goat cheese does not melt. It doesn’t. Don’t expect it to.

Second note: Quinoa is impressively filling. I ate two of the shells and Bek got through one and a half; I’m full right now. The half-shell we have left and the rest of the bed underneath it will be more than enough for lunch for me tomorrow. I was super happy with how this turned out; it’s not terribly original or anything like that (my contribution over what the guys on that thread suggested wasn’t much more than using the extra filling as a bed for the zucchini halves) but screw it: no recipe and it worked. Whee!

Yeah. The oven. After the Celsius fiasco (I seriously cannot believe I didn’t figure that out on my own) I got a bug up my ass and went out today and bought an oven thermometer. Long and short of it is I need to figure out how to retune my oven so that it produces something closer to the temperatures it says it will; at 350 it’s considerably less than that (fifty to sixty degrees lower when it beeps that it’s done preheating; if I give it another 1o minutes, it’ll be at 325) but it does 400 degrees basically exactly right. The convection setting is slightly more accurate but not much, and I haven’t actually tried to use the convection feature– until yesterday I hadn’t even bothered to figure out the difference. 375 degrees, if you give it a few minutes past the preheat beep, actually produces 350 degrees, but again: 400 is accurate. I suspect if I ever have a recipe that calls for 375 degrees I’m just going to have to go for 400 and watch it closely. My gut tells me that this shouldn’t make much difference– shit, people were baking over fire for thousands of years before modern ovens got invented and did just fine– but my gut is apparently incredibly crappy at baking, so… yeah. We’ll see.

Sooner or later, I’m gonna try a pie. I might just burn the damn house down, but I’m gonna try it anyway.