Recipe of the Month: Creamy Zucchini Pesto

Last week, as I spied the end of the June approaching, I started hunting around for a new Recipe of the Month. However, this quest was complicated by the early-summer heat wave, which made Brian reluctant to cook indoors any more than he had to. So he presented me with a list of all the veggies we had in the fridge and I started looking for a vegan-friendly dish we could cook on the grill with them. 

That search led me to the Easy Grilled Vegetables recipe from Damn Delicious. We didn't have all the veggies the recipe called for (many of which, like tomatoes and asparagus, aren't in season at the same time), but we figured that wasn't a big deal. Since the key component of that dish was the basil garlic sauce, we thought we'd just make a batch and serve it with our usual selection of grilled veggies, such as zucchini, pepper, and eggplant. In preparation for that, Brian went out and picked a bunch of fresh basil, the first of this year's crop.

But then a complication arose. Dark clouds started piling up in the sky, and the weather report, which had been predicting thunderstorms that night, moved their ETA up to the early evening. That meant we needed a new plan for dinner—one that would use up all that fresh-picked basil without the use of the grill. And, since it was still blazing hot, one that ideally wouldn't heat the kitchen up too much in the process.

So I tried looking for recipes again, this time including "fresh basil" as one of my search terms. Unfortunately, most of the hits I got were just recipes for pesto, which wasn't a new dish to us. But then I came upon a pesto recipe with a twist: the Creamy Zucchini Pesto from The Simple Veganista. This dish featured zucchini in two different forms: pureed as part of the pesto sauce, and cut into long strips to form the "noodles." It certainly cleared the bar for a veggie-centered dish, and it didn't call for anything we didn't have.

However, Brian and I were a bit skeptical about the use of zucchini strips in place of pasta. We've tried a couple of other dishes built on a base of raw veggie "noodles," such as the butternut squash ribbons we made last November, and they just weren't that satisfying. So instead, we decided to use a trick we learned during my low-carb period: mixing raw vegetable strips with real noodles. We had just enough basil to make a quarter-sized batch of the whole dish, which would normally use just half a zucchini's worth of "noodles"; instead, Brian used one very small zucchini plus four ounces of dry whole-wheat spaghetti. He sliced up the zuke with our spiralizer and sauteed the zoodles briefly in oil to soften them up before tossing them with the cooked pasta.

Brian used another mini zuke in the pesto, along with a smallish garlic clove and one-quarter the amount of all the other ingredients. Rather than steaming the zucchini as the recipe recommended, he cooked it in the same pan he'd used for the zoodles, adding a little bit of water and covering it just long enough to soften the squash. He had to add a little bit of oil—about two teaspoons—to this quarter-batch of pesto to get it to blend properly, but it was still much less oily than most pesto. The quarter-sized batch was more than enough to sauce up our mixture of pasta and zucchini.

The resulting dish was pretty good. It wasn't mind-blowing, but it was as flavorful as most pesto, and the addition of zucchini gave it a creamier texture without the need for a lot of high-fat (and expensive) nuts and oil. Its biggest downside was that, even with the added noodles to bulk it up, it wasn't terribly substantial. It really could have used a protein-rich ingredient to give it more heft. I ended up adding the tail end of a tin of herring to my meal because the noodles just weren't enough to fill me up on their own.

Still, I'd say this is a decent recipe, one that will definitely come in handy in a month or so when our zucchini plants are really cranking out the squash. Next time we'll try tossing in some cubed tofu, and maybe some halved cherry tomatoes as well. That will add flavor and texture interest, making the dish more satisfying to the palate as well as the stomach.

As for that other grilled vegetable recipe, I'm sure we'll get around to trying it some other time. There are still two or three months left of grilling season, and there's plenty more basil where this batch came from.