Zucchini Chips

This is for Amy G.  who thought these sounded interesting the other day and who seems to have the most amazing pictures of food on facebook.  For someone who doesn't eat meat, gluten or dairy, you have the best-looking food!

Did I mention in my CSA postings that I have absolutely no problem using up zucchini?  Mary Rollins and I discovered the other day that you can use raw zucchini slices to eat with things like hummus and feta-black bean dip.  It's sort of like a minimal calorie cracker substitute that requires less chewing than carrot chips.  I suppose other people knew that but it was new to us. 

A friend of mine told me a few weeks back that she had made zucchini chips that her family had gobbled up and being a fan of zucchini and chips, I had to try to make some myself.   I googled around looking for various zucchini chip recipes and found several that sounded interesting but none were quite what I wanted;  some involved frying which I felt defeated the purpose of eating a zucchini chip, others took way too long to cook (like two hours!!)  and some we didn't have the ingredients that we needed.  So naturally we made our own recipe from the best of them and even Will Mathews, arbiter of all vegetable dish deliciousness, said they were amazing.  Frankly, there's little I find more gratifying than preparing a vegetable that Will will eat. 

Here's what we did:

Pre-heat oven to 450 degrees

Ingredients:

One really big zucchini, or two normal-sized  ones, sliced thinly (probably just under a 1/4 inch -- a mandolin would have been really helpful but alas we did it by hand & knife).

3 egg whites (lightly stirred in a bowl)


1 cup of panko bread crumbs
1 cup of freshly grated parmesan cheese (you could probably use the stuff in a can but I don't think you could use the bagged, shredded grocery parmesan because it's not sticky enough)
1 tsp of Garlic Salt (My mother is probably reading this saying, "ooo too salty."  Okay so maybe you could just use garlic powder).
pinch of ground pepper
Mix these four ingredients in a separate bowl.

Dip the zucchini slices in the egg and then coat with the bread & cheese mixture.  Lay the slices on two baking sheets covered with parchment paper.  I spritzed the paper with a little olive oil but in retrospect that seems unneccessary. 

Bake for 7-8 minutes, turn chips over and return to over for another 7-8 minutes.  They should turn a nice, golden brown color. 

Mary Rollins and I pretty much ate the whole first pan as soon as they came out of the oven.  Embarrassing.