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#Zucchini Pasta

I've put various pasta sauces over cooked zucchini strips for years. This is certainly fine, but I've discovered some tricks for making zucchini pasta that's a little closer to actual pasta. The noodles can be more like fettuccine or linguine, depending upon how wide you cut them. I especially like this with pesto sauce as a side dish. Ingredients: * Zucchini * Salt

1. Using a vegetable peeler, peel strips off zucchini, working your way around the squash. They can be as wide or as narrow as you like. Keep going until you reach the seeds (a few seeds won't matter, but you don't want it to be too seedy). You can also use a mandolin for this. (Note: if you're counting carbs, weigh the noodles at this point. Zucchini carb profile, including carb counts, etc.)
2. Put the zucchini strips in a colander or strainer, sprinkle a liberal amount of salt over them,and toss to coat. Use perhaps a quarter teaspoon of or a little more of salt for several cups of strips. Put the colander over a bowl and put a small plate on top to squeeze out the juice as it emerges. To speed things up, put some kind of weight on the plate such as a can of food. You can leave it like this for an hour, or up to 24 hours (they get more solid over time, but most of the action happens in the first hour). If you think of it, toss the strips with your fingers at some point to make sure the brine is well-distributed.
3. Rinse the salt off and either press the excess water out (you can just return it to the colander/plate setup) or spread the “noodles” out on a cotton dish towel (not terry cloth, or you may get lint.
4. The zucchini pasta is now ready. It doesn't really need cooking, but you can gently warm it up. Don't cook it too long, or it will stick together and/or become mushy - it's much more delicate than regular pasta. Enjoy!

source: http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/lowcarbpasta/r/Zucchini-Pasta.htm

tags: low-carb, vegetarian, vegan, pareve