We love Italian food and have it often. One of my husband’s favorite dishes is eggplant rollatini, and he often gets it when we have takeaway from our favorite Italian restaurant. have you ever tried it? It’s delicious, but it looks complicated. All those thin strips of eggplant carefully filled, rolled, and baked. I’ve never attempted anything like it, but I’ve thought about it. Well, now I’m finally going to try something similar with this Mushroom Zucchini Lasagna Rolls recipe. It’s very similar to rollatini in the ingredients and technique. I’m kind of nervous about this one. Wish me luck!
These Mushroom Zucchini Lasagna Rolls are AMAZING and Clean Eating Approved!
The Ingredients
I was a little surprised when I saw how short the list of ingredients for this recipe is. It’s just over a dozen items, and that includes staples like salt, pepper, olive oil, and Italian seasoning.
I had to shop for the fresh items, of course, but everything was easy to find at my usual grocery store. I’ll have extra ricotta, mozzarella, and parmesan cheeses, but I’ll find uses for them.
Oh, and I did find a nice marinara since the recipe calls for something high quality. The brand I bought (Rao’s) also happened to be the only one sold in a 15.5-ounce jar. Every other brand was about double that. The recipe calls for 16 ounces, so I figured that would be close enough.
The Process
This recipe doesn’t list times (prep, cooking, total), but I went into it expecting it to take a while. I did, but I was quite pleased with the results. Here’s how my time was spent:
- 42 minute to prep (includes baking the zucchini strips)
- 15 minutes to cook
- 57 minutes total
The Zucchini
Things started off with the zucchini. It has to be sliced thinly, but I had no idea how thin. I went with about 1/8″. My mandoline was a lifesaver here, and it gave me plenty of strips of zucchini. In fact, I had so many that they filled both my sheet pans with some leftover. I used a 9'x13' baking dish lined with parchment paper for the extras.
The recipe says to lightly brush the zucchini with one tablespoon of olive oil. Apparently, I didn’t go lightly enough, and I ended up using two tablespoons. Oh well, more EVOO flavor is never a bad thing! Then it was into the oven for 12 minutes while I prepped the remaining ingredients.
The Mushroom Sauce
While the zucchini strips were baking, I got started on the mushroom sauce. This was a lot of slicing and dicing, but it wasn’t too bad. My mandoline has several attachments, and it made finely dicing the onion ridiculously fast. I did the rest of the chopping the old fashioned way.
I also managed to get the cheese mixture done while the zucchini was baking, and I was ready to cook the sauce by the time it was ready. That was simple sauteeing for about nine minutes.
Assembling the Mushroom Zucchini Lasagna Rolls
This was the part that I was worried about, and it was a little challenging. First off, let me say that you should give the filling a few minutes to cool down before you begin.
The recipe printout doesn’t have a photo, so I was working with the written instructions and my memory of the blog post. The post shows six big rolls in a skillet, but I just couldn’t get mine that size. I found smaller rolls much easier to handle, so I made 18 smaller Mushroom Zucchini Lasagna Rolls.
Even with all those rolls, I ended up with a few extra strips of zucchini. I even had to double up the shorter strips to make them long enough to roll.
I ran out of the cheese mixture towards the end, but that didn’t surprise me. The recipe said to add two spoonfuls to each piece of zucchini, but I wasn’t sure what size spoon. Two teaspoons? Tablespoons?
In the end, I just spread some cheese the length of the zucchini so it would act like glue to hold the roll together. Then I spooned some mushroom sauce onto the end and carefully rolled it up. There was some leakage out the sides, but most of the rolls held together well. That was the hard part. The rest was sprinkling on some shredded mozzarella and baking for 15 minutes.
