Showing posts with label chives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chives. Show all posts

Friday, August 15, 2014

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!