Baked Vegetarian Zuchinni Cups

In this day and age, it has been suggested mixing your regular meat-based meals with vegetarian alternatives can be beneficial for your health.  Growing up, certain Chinese religion would dictate certain times of the month or year as solely vegetarian.  

Being the ninth month in the lunar calendar year, this is the time of of the year where my grandma would bring out a separate complete set of utensils, pots and pans and we would go on a strict vegetarian diet for nine days.  This was a celebration for the 9 Emperor Gods and I would get so excited during this time as this was also a fabulous opportunity to taste different vegetarian dishes along the streets of Penang (and for those that haven't tasted hawker foods in a street environment, you don't know what you are missing!).

Although I now no longer practice the nine-day vegetarian diet, I have been asked by vegetarian friends to share some vegetarian recipes that they could try. I have tweaked my favourite zucchini slice recipe to turn this into a vegetarian option, which I might add, is still pretty darn tasty! 

I have created these into cups for ease of transportation for the boys lunch box, however you can absolutely combine all the ingredients and just put it into a big dish for dinner. This is a recipe that you can also add your own creative licencing to as well, adding any other kind of vegetables to it (can you tell I am a big advocate for "scrape-the-bottom-of-the-fridge-Friday" recipes??!).

Ingredients :

2 to 3 Zuchinni, grated

1 to 2 carrots, grated 

5 fresh button mushrooms, chopped

1 cup of flour

1/4 cup of cooking oil

5 eggs

1 cup of tasty cheese

salt and pepper to taste
350g vegetarian ham, thinly sliced 
Mozzarella cheese to top (optional)

Steps :

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celcius.

Mix all the above ingredients and put in little cupcake cases.  You can either add ham in with the rest of the ingredients or have it pan-fried as a side accompaniment.  Fry the ham whilst the cups are cooling until golden and crispy.

Top with grated mozzarella cheese if you are using. Bake for 30 minutes.

How easy is that? Perfect for lunch or snacks on the go, easy to make, and trust me, kids will get jealous when they see that these are in your children's lunchboxes!  Happy baking, my friends.