Zucchini Noodles

My favorite vegan/raw food restaurant does a mean zucchini noodle dish that I'm super into.  So, when I dumpstered 5 zucchini and didn't feel like making zucchini bread or ratatouille, I decided to try making zucchini noodles for the first time instead.

<u>Ingredients:</u>
- 4 zucchini
- flavorful sauce of some sort (I used my pesto cream sauce recipe, but substituted peanuts and a little sesame oil in my pesto instead of cashews, since that's what I had)

Zucchini noodles are painfully easy to make.  There are cool contraptions you can buy to make it look more like pasta, but you basically just need a vegetable peeler and some time to accomplish a more fettuccine-type noodle.  You peel the skin off, then just keep peeling around the whole zucchini longways until you get to the seeds at the core.  At that point, you can cut the core up for a salad, stir fry, or ratatouille so you're using the vegetable in more ways than one!

Once you've made the zucchini noodles according to the directions above, you can make up some kind of sauce (I made a pesto cream sauce to keep it in the raw food category.  If you're vegan, you could just do pesto plus a tomato or something).  It's a pretty flavorful dish.

One thing to mention, though - the zucchini noodles lose their moisture if you salt them and leave them in the fridge over time, so try to eat them all up after one or two meals or they can get kind of gross...

Items not dumpstered or donated: cream, sesame oil, garlic

Spicy Chipotle Cream Sauce + How to Roast a Pepper

If you dumpster often, you know that you find bell peppers (and various types of peppers) a lot.

Pickyourown.org has pretty exhaustive tips and instructions on canning, and roasted peppers are one of my favorite things to can (you can also can raw bell peppers on their own, you just need a crapton of vinegar and canning salt to make it work).

Even if you don't want to can your peppers, roasting them will still make them last about 2 weeks longer in your fridge.

You incidentally also need roasted bell or chipotle peppers for this dish I'm about to lay down:

HOW TO ROAST A BELL PEPPER

It's actually uber simple! When you roast bell peppers, they unlock the pepper's sweetness. Just take your pepper, de-stem/seed it, then stick it in your oven or toaster oven (to save power) at about 400-500 degrees until the skin turns black (rotating it from time to time so it cooks evenly). Let it cool down, and the skin should come off easily with your hands or a knife (but be careful - the pepper will be smokin' hot). Slice it up and you've got yourself some roasted bell peppers.

You can use these for canning, puree them for an amuse bouche, pasta sauce, pizza, whatever. Get creative.

And now:

SPICY CHIPOTLE CREAM SAUCE (w/ Pasta and Stuff)

Ingredients:

- 3 tbsp butter
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 cup of fresh or canned corn (about 1/2 a can)
- 1 small onion, chopped
- 1/2-1 portabella mushroom cap
- Pasta of some sort (I used rotini)
- 1/2-3/4 cup of heavy whipping cream
- Cumin, nutmeg, basil, rosemary, red chili powder (hot), and salt & pepper to taste
- 1-2 roasted peppers (I used 1 orange pepper and a small red pepper from my garden):
Melt the butter in a medium pan.
Throw in the onion and mushroom on medium heat. Allow for the onions to become translucent and the mushroom to become soft. When they're almost finished, throw in the garlic, roasted red pepper, and corn.
Set your water to boil for the pasta and boil pasta as you finish the next steps.
Turn heat on veggies to medium-low.
Add cream (make sure the pan isn't too hot, or it will scald the cream). Continue stirring often while the sauce thickens so it doesn't coagulate.
Add red chili powder, cumin, and nutmeg. The nutmeg is what rounds out the creamy flavor of the sauce (pretty much every cream sauce in French cuisine will have some nutmeg in it for this reason), so don't be shy with it.
Add rosemary (fresh), basil (fresh), salt, & pepper to taste.

Once you've found a nice balance for your sauce, throw everything over your pasta and enjoy.


Items not donated or dumpstered: 1 red pepper (garden), whipping cream, basil (garden), rosemary (garden), butter, spices