Zucchini Pasta with Creamy Lemon Chive Dressing

Our plans for dinner last night started out with this dish from Martha Stewart's website, but I quickly realized two crucial things: 1) there is no actual spaghetti in this zucchini spaghetti and 2) there is no way we are going to get our zucchini sliced that thin without a mandolin at our disposal. I love the idea of a dish comprised entirely of julienned zucchini, but it just was not going to happen without that important piece of equipment. Still, since I thought it looked so yummy, and was intrigued by the dressing, I decided to improvise.

True zucchini pasta will have to go into the someday file for us. For last night though, I stuck with the lemon-chive dressing and combined a half-pound of fettuccine with a half-pound of coarsely grated zucchini. Yum yum! More about the recipe modification below.

Creamy Lemon-Chive Dressing from Martha Stewart
 

Don't mind that over-toasted baguette in the picture - we had some build-your-own bruschetta with dinner last night too.

Used From Our CSA
zucchini

Steve mincing chives (and doing so quite precisely, I might add)

Thoughts on the Recipe
-We prepared the dressing recipe as it was written, and cooked up a 1/2 lb. of fettuccine.
- This step is modified from the original zucchini spaghetti recipe: I grated a zucchini, enough to get 1/2 lb., and tossed it in a strainer with some salt. I let that sit for about 15 minutes and then squeezed the zucchini against the sides of the strainer to try to get out as much water as I could. Since it was grated instead of julienned, I didn't have to be so gentle (I'm sure Martha would be disappointed).
- The pasta, zucchini and dressing (we used it all) were tossed together in a bowl. Done!
- In the end, I think this could have done with more zucchini - why not? Since we have no shortage of it right now, grating another one would not have been a bad idea, and would have stretched this dish farther.

This was a wonderfully simple dish to pull off on a weeknight. I love the lightness that the zucchini brings to it. And I've said before that Steve & I don't normally gravitate toward pasta, but I would definitely make this one again. Hooray for finding another way to work through that zucchini!