— Michael Senteck

I have never made a keto pasta myself because, uh, most of them contain either an egg white or an egg yolk or a whole egg. But I wanted to revisit, uh, Michael's query about zucchini pasta because, um, maybe about a year or so ago, uh, we were out to a restaurant and I ordered zucchini pasta, thinking that it was going to be steamed broccoli with, you know, a little spaghetti sauce on it or whatever. And when it was delivered to the table, I thought that I died and went to pasta heaven. And I said to the server, Hey, can you ask the chef what he did to the zucchini? And the server came back and he said, oh, the chef said to come in the kitchen. So here is my version of this beautiful dish, and I hope that you can all see it. And, um, a couple of things that you can of course use an easy spiralizer. This is a handheld spiralizer. I like it because it's small and compact, and if I'm teaching a class someplace, it's just very easy to tag along instead of one of the grinding types. And when you take a zucchini, it makes this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful strands of pasta. I do recommend to remove the peel because it's of a different texture and it cooks at a different speed than the actual zucchini would. So you would have all of your zucchini being the same size and of the same texture. And, um, I make a very, very simple marinara. The one that we have in our program is quite good. Um, quite simply, if you go back to the beginning of the mushroom assignment where you are sauteing, uh, and de glazing onions and garlic, uh, that's the beginning of it. And then what I do is I add fresh quartered tomatoes to it so that the tomatoes help to thicken it up a little bit rather than using tomato paste because I don't wanna add any more sodium to the dish. But I want to taste the flavor of the fresh tomatoes and the zucchini and the garlic. And, um, some of you like to use whole tomatoes. Some of you like to use diced tomatoes. Some of you like to use puree. I don't know how many of you ever use a sata, but a sata is pureed raw tomatoes. And I just find that it gives a really nice flavor to any pasta sauce that you're making. My number one observation is that it's not from a can. So you don't have that metallic taste that sometimes comes through and, uh, it just makes, um, a really beautiful pasta sauce. And, uh, you're gonna make your sauce and then throw the zucchini into the pan and cover it and simmer for about 10 minutes. And then what happens after the 10 minutes? And I'm just gonna show I cut these by hand. You can use the spiralizer, but a part of me likes to think that I'm actually eating a linguini or something like that. When you hand cut them, you can sort of designate whether you wanna have a fettuccini or whether you want a linguini or whether rather than just having, you know, uh, a regular pasta. So it's totally up to you. But simmering the zucchini, do not steam them in a separate pot because you want, during the process of the pan filled with a little bit of tomato sauce, you want the zucchini and those flavors to mar marry and come together. So it's delicious. I might add on it a little bit of some, um, nutritional yeast. And then my favorite thing always is some, uh, crushed red pepper. And I would have this with a big salad, maybe a homemade fennel sausage made with oatmeal and wrapped in brown rice paper casing. So Michael, I want you to try this because when you get into your kitchen and you see how easy this is to make, and one last thing, um, this will serve this size, zucchini will serve about one person. So we'll go back, you're gonna peel it, and then you're gonna take a potato peeler and you're going to make little ribbons of the pasta, and then you're going to hand cut them, and that will make a beautiful linguini or fettuccine. Again, if you want to have just a plain old ordinary spaghetti, you can use a nice little handheld, uh, like this. And, um, I work sometimes with older adults who have arthritis issues and they find this very easy because it's got a big doorknob on it. Oddly enough, it's made by Tupperware. I don't have a relationship with Tupperware, but this is my go-to, uh, spiralizer, especially when I teach, because as I mentioned earlier, it doesn't take up a lot of space.