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Vegan Arugula Pesto with Zucchini Noodles

I’ve been wanting to make something new for dinner for a while now, but I wanted it to have a comfort food feel. When I can’t quite decide what I want to do, I usually look through my photo database that contains years of images from meals (good and bad) long since forgotten. That’s when I saw a photo of an old favorite, and I knew what had to be done.

arugula pesto with zucchini noodles - fork

For this dinner makeover, I started with my recipe for arugula pesto. I wanted to make it vegan to reflect my current way of eating, so that meant eliminating the Parmesan cheese I used in the original. Easy! All I did was replace the cheese with nutritional yeast, adding a bit more olive oil as needed to achieve the right consistency. BOOM. Done.

Then I replaced regular noodles with zoodles – the kitschy name for julienned strips of zucchini. I use a mandolin slicer to make this particular magic, but there are devices on the market that exist solely for this purpose. I tend to agree with Alton Brown on the matter though, and rarely have single-use devices in the kitchen.

I steamed the zoodles (in an inexpensive bamboo steamer, no less) just enough to given them that perfect al dente bite.

zucchini noodles in the steamer

All that was left was to bring these two together into a single glorious bowl of deliciousness.

arugula pesto with zucchini noodles

Dinner is served. And awesome.

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