I love pasta but it doesn’t quite fit with my new health plan. In an effort to get the enjoyment of pasta but not the calories I decided I would turn my veggies into pasta. On Tuesday’s I have the day off so quite often I offer to cook for my roommate. She thinks I’m being nice, I just wanted to have something else to write about. But hey, I’ll take the nice points.

My thought was that I would mix the veggies with some sort of asian noodle and then make a simple peanut sauce. I combed the aisles of the grocery store and I just found two noodle products, one that was all ready cooked (Yucky!), and one that looked more like ramen type noodles. I stood there and scratched my head. What was I going to do? I finally decided that I would just make it strictly a veggie dish, just bulk up the veggies. The other thing you should know is that I literally had to talk myself down from buying a whole loaf of bread to go with this meal. Seriously. I walked past the bakery, perused what they had and decided against it. When I was in the Asian section and couldn’t find the noodles I wanted I tried to convince myself that getting a loaf of bread was fine since I wasn’t having the calories from the noodles. I started to walk over to the bread again. In my mind I saw myself getting home, lathering up the bread with sticks of butter and eating it all in one sitting. I took a deep breath and refrained.

I ended up buying carrots, a zucchini, summer squash, lime, soy sauce and to that I was going to add peppers,mushrooms and garlic. So I got home, took the dog out and put the groceries away. I decided it would be a good idea to get my mise en place ready. Do you know what mise en place is? Mise en place in French means ‘put in place.’ It’s what chef’s do with their ingredients before each service in a restaurant.

How was I going to make my veggies look like pasta? A peeler! I took a peeler and just peeled everything to get nice little strands of mock pasta.

When I got to the seeds on the zucchini and summer squash I stopped peeling. I wanted the texture to be like pasta and felt like the seeds would have messed that up. I did put the seeds and left over stuff in a ziploc bag so I could use them on a salad later.

Then I set out and made my peanut sauce. I added together juice of a lime, juice of 1/4 orange, 1.5 tablespoons of peanut butter, and a tablespoon of olive oil and soy sauce and mixed with a wisk until it became smooth.

I also sliced up peppers and minced fresh garlic.

Above is all of my mise en place, except I’m not sure where my garlic went. At this point everything is ready to saute in the pan. I got a pan out, put enough oil to lightly coat the bottom of it and began to saute the peppers, then I added the garlic and mushrooms. You always want to add the garlic at a time when the heat isn’t too high because it tends to burn easily.

Then I added the rest of the vegetables. I didn’t want them to cook very much because I like texture in my veggies so I stirred them a little bit and then turned the heat off and covered the pan. Then I added the peanut sauce and mixed it around. I tasted a little to check for flavor and realized that it needed some more salt so I added some. I held off on adding salt until the end because the soy sauce was salty enough and wanted to make sure I didn’t over power it.

I decided that I would cook some salmon with it. I just put some fresh garlic on the salmon, salt and peppered each side and then put a wedge of orange on top. I baked it in a 375 degree oven for about 15 minutes. I loved the simple flavor of the garlic, salt and citrus. The best part for me was I was able to twirl the veggies around my fork just like I could pasta!

Veggie Noodles with Peanut Sauce

Ingredients

1 carrot

1 zucchini

1 yellow squash

1 cup sliced mushrooms

2 gloves minced garlic

1 red pepper

1 yellow pepper

Sauce

Juice of 1 lime

Juice of 1/4 orange

1.5 tbs creamy peanut butter

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 table spoon soy sauce

Method

1. Wash and peel the carrot, zucchini and squash. Peel the squash just to the seeds, you do not want seeds in this dish. Save the remaining squash for a salad or another saute.

2. Slice the peppers as thin as you can get them and mince the garlic.

3. Mix all sauce ingredients together and let stand.

4. Saute peppers in olive oil and add mushrooms and garlic. Saute rest of ingredients being careful not to over cook. I turned the heat off and covered the pan so they could steam. Add the sauce and serve!