Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Recipe: Zucchini Noodles

The hubby is out of town on a business trip this week, so I've decided to experiment in the kitchen. Specifically I'm trying some pasta substitutes. If they turn out well, then I will add them into the dinner rotation. Tonight, I got to play with a new toy I received for my birthday earlier this month -- the spiral slicer.  The experiment: zucchini "noodles". 

Here is my amazing spiral slicer:

I like to leave the skin on my vegetables for the extra fiber, so I cut off the top and bottom of the zucchini and started spiralizing (pretty sure I just made up my own word).  This tool is really neat. You spin the zucchini in it like you are sharpening a pencil.  This is what it looked like when I was finished:
One cool result of using this tool is the center of the zucchini, where the seeds are located, stayed separate from the noodles. Can you see my sharpened zucchini pencil at the top of the picture?

Once the zucchini was cut, it was ready to cook. 

I sprayed a large pan with coconut oil cooking spray. It's important to use a large pan when you saute. If you over-crowd the pan, everything will turn out soggy. 


Once I got some color on the noodles, I added just enough water to cover the bottom of the pan and continued to cook on medium-high until the water boiled off.  This step introduces steam to the noodles and ensures they are cooked though. My finished noodles looked like this:
At this point the noodles are complete and you can serve them as is, or you can incorporate them into a dish.  I decided to make a skinny chicken Parmesan dish, so, at his point, I added about 1/4 cup of tomato sauce to the noodles and cooked until the sauce was warm through.  The amount of sauce you add is completely personal preference. I do not like a lot of sauce in my dishes, so the 1/4 cup was plenty.
I put the noodles on a plate and stacked a ground chicken burger on top and melted a slice of Swiss cheese over the dish. 
 Yum!  I liked the zucchini noodles in this dish.  They delivered on texture, and tasted great.  I would totally make this meal again!

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