Air-Fryer Stuffed Zucchini Boats

The stuffed zucchini boat sits in a class of recipes that solve a specific problem: what to do with the giant zucchini that appeared in your CSA box, or that your neighbour left on your porch in August, or that grew to football-size in your own garden because you went on vacation for a week. The hollow-out-and-stuff move turns the zucchini into a vehicle for the actual dinner — ground meat, spices, cheese — while still letting you claim you cooked a vegetable.

The filling here is Mediterranean-leaning: ground beef (or lamb, which is even better) browned with onion, garlic, oregano, cinnamon (yes, cinnamon — the secret to the right "Greek meat" flavour), tomato paste, and parsley. The mixture goes into the hollowed zucchini halves, gets topped with crumbled feta, and finishes in the air fryer where the cheese melts and the zucchini softens to just-tender.

The photo shows four zucchini boats lined up in a square white baking dish, each filled with dark-brown spiced meat with visible white feta crumbles and torn basil leaves on top. The zucchini sides have charred slightly at the edges. This is the kind of dinner that looks like more effort than it took — about 35 minutes start to finish, mostly hands-off.

A note on the zucchini: medium-large is the right size (8–10 inches long, the thickness of a small wrist). Tiny zucchini don't hold enough filling; giant baseball-bat zucchini are watery and seedy. The boats are easiest to scoop with a melon baller or a small spoon.