Zucchini - Corn Quesadilla & Tortilla Soup

Quesadilla, the Mexican restaurant staple, is a hot favorite dinner item in our home. I have posted a bell pepper quesadilla before. This time, the quesadilla is stuffed with a mix of zucchini, corn & black beans. This is my favorite kind. Here's how I made it:

2 zucchinis - washed and chopped into bite-size pieces

1 medium onion - chopped

1 cup frozen corn

1 can black beans - drained & rinsed

1 heaped tsp cumin pwd

1 heaped tsp coriander pwd

Salt to taste

Tabasco hot sauce to taste

1 tsp olive or veg. oil

Tortillas - I use Multi-Grain ones

1/2 cup shredded Mexican cheese blend

Heat the oil in a non-stick pan. Saute the onions till transluscent. Add the zucchini & saute on medium high for 5 mins. Zucchini does not take long to cook, especially when thinly sliced. Add the corn, black beans, salt, cumin and coriander pwds and tabasco sauce. Mix well and heat through. I keep my veggie mix quite mild for my daughter and when stuffing in the tortillas, I add an extra few drops of the Tabasco sauce for hubby & myself.

To make the quesadilla, fold the tortilla into half. Spoon 2-3 tbsp of the veggie mix on the lower half. Add extra hot sauce at this stage. Top with shredded cheese & cover with the top half. The restaurant version of quesadillas is usually oozing with cheese, but I like to go light on this. I add just a bit, enough to act as a binder when the tortilla is folded over and cooked.

Roast both sides on a pan. You can use a few drops of oil, but I like to dry roast it and char it up a bit. This time I used a grill pan to roast to get those grill lines u see in the picture above.

Cool for a minute before cutting into half and serving. Salsas, guacamole or sour cream make good accompaniments to the quesadilla, but I always serve them with this easy tortilla soup. Here's how I made the soup:

About 1 cup of the above veggie mix

2 small tomatoes - chopped

4 cups of veg. broth

Extra salt, cumin pwd, coriander pwd, tabasco sauce to season

Mix all the above and give it one good boil. To serve, crush some tortilla chips in a bowl, pour ladlefuls of soup and top with more crushed tortilla chips. Usually I use regular tortilla chips (especially the broken ones from the tostito scoops pack) but this time I cut up a tortilla into strips and microwaved it till crisp (in 20 sec. intervals for a total of about 3 mins.).

Now, nobody would associate quesadillas with dieting, right? But my version is, I believe, a lite one. The veggie mix has only 1 tsp of oil. The cheese is kept to a minimum - I have not measured how much I use in each quesadilla, but probably about 1 tbsp. The quesadilla is dry roasted. Oh, the tortilla I used (Bestlife multi-grain ones from Costco) has 100 calories and 25 fat calories per tortilla. And accompanied with the healthy, fat-free soup, you don't need more than one quesadilla to fill you up.

Hence this quesadilla and soup are off to the Diet Foods event at Divya's Dil-Se.

Coming to topics other than food, EC of Simple Indian Food had tagged me a while back to state six unspectacular quirks about myself. So here they are:

I am a very shy person.

I avoid driving on the freeway.

I have tried in vain to learn swimming.

I have tried in vain to bake.

I find it difficult to remember birthdates.

I don't follow stuff like chain mails etc.

Hence I had avoided this tag for a while. But I do appreciate EC thinking about me and did want to share some facts about myself. However, I don't want to force anyone to take up this tag. Hence if you read it and want to state six quirks about yourself, consider yourself tagged.

On a similar note, Kitchen Flavours has given me a Butterfly Award. It is my very first award in the food blog world and means a great deal to me. Thank you dear.

One of the rules of the award is to nominate 10 other blogs. But I follow so many beautiful, cool blogs...its hard to pick only 10. So this goes out to all the food bloggers.