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This creamy zucchini recipe is made with cottage cheese, Velveeta process cheese, butter, milk and mixed in with macaroni. It’s like macaroni and cheese…but for grown-ups!
Because it uses ingredients like cottage cheese and Velveeta, it’s pretty easy to make. You just cook your pasta, measure out the ingredients, mix it all together and bake!
The one thing I have my reservations on in this recipe is the call for garlic powder. In my experience, mixing garlic powder with cottage cheese and/or mac and cheese – sounds like it would work great…but never really does.
So, I’m leaving that as completely optional and I would probably recommend skipping it, just based on my own experiences with garlic powder mixed in with mac and cheese. You think garlic and cheese, what could go wrong? Well, a lot!
The french fried onions on top sounds pretty tasty too. If you don’t have french fried onions, you could probably substitute something like crushed croutons or crushed potato chips or crushed cornflakes.
I wanted to make this recipe this week, it sounds so good, but alas our grocery store was completely out of cottage cheese! How on earth does that happen? I regularly eat cottage cheese for lunch or snacks so this was pretty surprising.
There are a lot of different kinds of cottage cheeses out there – I have found in my experience the “best” cottage cheeses are the regular 4% milk fat ones – and make sure they have salt!
If you accidentally buy the low-fat sodium free cottage cheese {which I have done before because it’s easy to get mixed up by all the different labels} – you can always add salt if needed {taste it first!} – but you might be surprised by just how much salt IS needed! This recipe is also a great way to use it up!
When Were Recipes With Parkay Maragine + Velveeta First Published?
Here is the front of the recipe card:
Here is the back of the recipe card:
I always try to find the original source of a recipe, but sometimes it can be tricky to do! I noticed this recipe includes two very specific brands: Velveeta Process Cheese and Parkay Margarine.
As I talked about in the recipe for Turkey Tetrazzini made with Velveeta, Velveeta became a Kraft food brand in 1927, and Parkay was only a Kraft food brand between the years of 1937 and 1995 before being sold to ConAgra Foods.
It stands to reason that this recipe, along with the Turkey Tetrazzini recipe likely appeared in a magazine advertisement or promotional recipe book published by Kraft, especially since both of these recipes were found in the same recipe box!
I’ll continue to keep a lookout for old recipe books and magazines – maybe one of these days I might just be able to solve the mystery of the original published source of these recipes.
Until then, I’m definitely going to make this recipe soon – as soon as our store gets cottage cheese back in stock! We did have some snow storms across the country the past week, so it’s possible that may be why the stores were out of stock.
Creamy Zucchini Casserole Recipe
Ingredients
- ½ cup quartered Zucchini slices
- 1 tablespoon margarine or butter
- ½ lb Velveeta process cheese spread cubed
- ¼ cup milk
- 1 ½ cup elbow macaroni cooked and drained
- 1 ½ cup cottage cheese
- ¾ cup canned french fried onions
Instructions
- Saute zucchini in margarine until tender.
- Heat cheese and milk on low heat. Stir until sauce is smooth.
- Combine all ingredients except french fried onions.
- Spoon into 1 1/4 quart casserole dish. Bake at 375 F for 30 minutes.
- Top with french fried onions and bake an additional 3-5 minutes until onions are golden brown.
- Serve and Enjoy!
Notes
Nutrition
Looking for other zucchini Recipes?
If you have a lot of zucchini, here are some other great zucchini recipes you might like!
Pizza Zucchini – This is a casserole deep dish type of pizza made with cornbread.
As always, I hope you enjoy these recipes and if you make them I would love to hear your thoughts and reviews in the comments section below!