CEIMB: Grilled Zucchini Roll-Ups with Herbs and Cheese

Today's post will be just a short break from all the coconut madness of this week. No worries; I'll be back with more coconut goodness in the next couple of days. Now, onto this week's Craving Ellie in My Belly recipe!

This one comes to us from Liz over at My Table, Their Table. We made Grilled Zucchini Roll-Ups with Herbs and Cheese, although by "we," I kinda mean Andy. He pretty much did the whole thing himself; I just co-piloted while I was doing other things. The recipe is simple enough. Slice some zucchini lengthwise (Andy was so proud of himself when he figured out that he could do this with the cheese slicer!), then grill it up until tender. He did this the night before.

The next day, he assembled the filling mixture. The original recipe calls for goat cheese, but if I'm being honest here I have to say we dislike goat cheese. We've tried it on several different occasions, but our reaction is pretty much always the same. We agree that it leaves an unpleasant aftertaste and tastes almost too much like stinky cheese, if that makes sense. We just happened to have some taleggio cheese on hand, so we used that. Taleggio is a softer cheese, smells and tastes pungent, but isn't quite as hard for us to take as the goat cheese.

So anyway, the filling is comprised of the taleggio cheese, lemon juice, and some dried parsley (we did not have any fresh). You place some of this cheese mixture on one end of a zucchini slice, top this with a few fresh spinach leaves and a basil leaf, and roll it up. It was a bit tricky, because of the tenderness of the zucchini, but I thought Andy did an amazing job. They were so beautiful on the plate!

He loved these, but unfortunately I did not really care for them. I don't know what's wrong with me; I enjoy each ingredient on its own. I think I'd prefer my zucchini warm, not chilled. Also, I had a hard time figuring out how to eat it, so I just popped a whole roll in my mouth. The problem is, I think they're just a tad too big to do that. Oh, well. I'm glad we tried this! It made for a fun side dish/starter. Thanks to Liz for the pick!

The recipe for these can be found over at Food Network's website, here.