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!

Fettuccine with Agretti & Tomato Peach Salad

Today I have two dishes to share that we made on Wednesday night. Along with some burgundy beans, these two things made for an awesome mid-week dinner (albeit time-intensive).

Our main dish was this lemon fettuccine with agretti. For the most part we do not tend to be big pasta people, but since we had no earthly idea what to do with the agretti or previous context for how to eat it, pasta seemed like a reasonable place to start. And man oh man, what a treat; who knew that lemon and bacon could compliment each other so well? Add in the agretti, and we had the perfect triumvirate of winning at pasta. We ended up dumbing down the recipe quite a bit; and I'll elaborate more on that below. But even with our cheats it was totally worthwhile. 

Lemon Fettuccine with Agretti, Bacon, and Roasted Garlic on Round the Table

On the side we had this tomato, peach & burrata salad. It's basically a fun variation on the caprese salad theme: heirloom tomato, peach, burrata cheese, and a balsamic reduction with some basil. A total win and, in contrast to the pasta, quick and easy to put together. As she says in the recipe, fresh mozzarella can substitute for the burrata if needed. It was more steeply priced, but we decided to spring for it because we were curious. It's basically a cream-infused fresh mozzarella, so ... yeah; we obviously wanted to give that a whirl. And since we only needed half of it, we should be able to repeat this recipe again soon. Woohoo!

Tomato, Peach & Burrata Salad on two peas & their pod 

Used From Our CSA
agretti
peaches
burgundy beans (eaten on the side)

Thoughts on the (Pasta) Recipe
- We had several ingredient substitutions in this: regular fettuccine instead of lemon fettuccine (couldn't even find it at our run-of-the-mill grocery store), raw garlic instead of roasted (didn't want to take the time to roast it ourselves for just two cloves' worth), and Parmesan cheese instead of Romano (because it's what we keep on hand). I'm sure it had the potential to be even more awesome had we used some of those swankier things, but the good news is that it was still great without them.
- I'm not sure if this is always the case, but we realized, once we had served up our finished pasta, that the agretti stems were pretty woody and tough to eat. So we went through it all after the fact to cut the softer leaves from their stems, which clearly would have been much easier before it was all cooked and cheesy. Next time we'll get that right, but still: no real harm done. Once that was taken care of I really enjoyed the taste of this interesting Mediterranean vegetable.


Has anyone else ever cooked with agretti? Did you have to remove the stems? What did you make? Leave your thoughts in the comments!