Golden spaghetti

This was inspired by a post on Beyond Salmon, where she posted a recipe after spending a day working in a restaurant kitchen.  It looked like a tasty, interesting way to use a zucchini, and since I happened to have two different kinds of cheeses, making a pasta dish for lunch seemed like an excellent idea.  Can't say no to spaghetti in a creamy sauce with lots of cheese!  No Ed-rating, as he wasn't home for lunch, but I'll be trying this again for dinner sometime.  It was quite tasty.  I also really liked the idea of using the seeds of the squash for something useful, as opposed to slogging through eating them the normal way.  I've never been a huge fan of zucchini seeds.

Golden spaghetti:

Made enough for one large lunch.  I suppose you should add more pasta or another zucch if you want to stretch it.  This isn't Helen Rennie's original recipe, since I was missing a few key ingredients, like cream, and parsley.

1 golden zucchini

1/4 box of spaghetti

1-2tbs milk or cream

1 clove garlic, minced

~1/4C grated cheese (in my case, a mix of pecorino roman and ricotta salata)

salt and pepper to taste

Get a pot of water boiling for the spaghetti. Salt the water.

Using a mandolin, slice thin slices off the zucchini until you get to the seeds.  Rotate the squash, and continue, until you've sliced off all the non-seedy flesh in very thin slices.  Cut those slices lengthwise so that you have vaguely spaghetti-shaped pieces of squash.  Cut the seedy core of the remaining zucchini crosswise into pennies, and fry those in some olive oil on medium-high heat until they're browned on both sides.  Toast the garlic in the remaining oil, then add the zucchini seeds and garlic to a food processor or blender.  Add a dash or two of milk (or cream, if you have it… I had milk), and puree to a thick sauce.  Season with salt and pepper.

Once you've added the spaghetti to the water, fry the strands of squash in some olive oil or butter.  They'll take ~5min, at which point you should taste the spaghetti.  If it's ~3/4 of the way cooked, pull out some of the cooking water, then drain the rest of the pasta, and add it to the frying pan that has the zucchini.  Pour in the sauce, grate in the cheese, and continue to stir/cook until the spaghetti is cooked through.  If the sauce thickens up too much, add some of the pasta-cooking-water to thin it.  

Once it's done, plop in a wide bowl and enjoy!  Or you could try to twirl it into pretty little thingies, but that was too much work, really.