Eating paleo doesn’t mean I have to “give up” my pasta after all. I just have to be creative with my pasta! Now I am not going to tell you that this would fool someone into thinking they are eating noodles made from flour, but if you have a gluten allergy this would work for an option. I would chalk the shape of the zucchini and squash to a flat linguini type noodle. If I had different culinary tools I could have shaved it into more of a spaghetti style, but alas those are at my office and I am home.
Pasta
cut off the end of the zucchini so you have a flat surface to keep your veggie stable.
Using a standard vegetable pealer make strips of zucchini/squash rotating around the vegetable until you start to see seeds. Keep the “core” of the zucchini to use in your sauce. For two people I used one zucchini and one squash, but if you want more make more veggies are good for you!
I put my strips into my steamer pot – these are great, if you don’t have one you can improvise if you have a metal colander and a large pot with a lid. Fill the bottom of the pot with water making sure it doesn’t touch the bottom of the colander (there needs to be space to steam), set the colander in the pot with your veggies in the colander, set the water to boil and put the lid on your pot. Ta Da! Instant steamer.
Steam your zucchini and squash for about 10 minutes or so. Enough to take the crunch out and get them hot, but not so long that they turn into mush.
Sauce
For my sauce I used every vegetable I had in the house so do the same for yours.
One small yellow onion diced
Tri-peppers – green, yellow and red bell peppers 1/2 a pepper of each color diced
The core of the Zucchini and Squash diced
Two large Tomatoes juiced and diced
3 cloves of garlic, minced -I like garlic mmmm
Fresh basil minced to taste
I sauteed all of my vegetables minus the tomatoes and herbs using coconut oil. I will get into the reason I cook with coconut oil later. While I had those vegetables cooking I squeezed the juice out of my tomatoes and set aside to use in my sauce. Dice the tomatoes and set aside to add later. Once all the vegetable were cooked through I took about a cup of the mix, added it to the tomato juice and pureed it in my food processor. I then added the tomatoes, the puree and the herbs into the remaining cooked vegetables to make my sauce chunky. You could always blend the whole thing, but I like chunky sauce.
I think this would be really good with shrimp or chicken. I didn’t have any shrimp or chicken so I ate it vegetarian style.
