Zucchini Pesto Salad

For this recipe, I’m using raw zucchini as if it were pasta!

I have a recipe from Six O’Clock Scramble on my Summer Celebrations Pinterest board. With this in the back of my mind, we woke up late one morning, the result of a night out. After tea and coffee and checking our iPads to see what we’d missed while we’d been sleeping (the new equivalent of reading the morning newspaper), I remembered that we were out of our usual breakfast foods! 🙁

The one thing we did have was a couple of zucchini. It was late enough to call our meal brunch, so this is what we made. A veggie based, pasta-like salad, enough to keep us going until we made a trip to the supermarket. While not as fancy as Aviva’s on Six O’Clock Scramble; it was still very enjoyable! I think grated zucchini could be a great low-carb carrier for many of the sauces we usually put on pasta. I’m thinking about a red sauce next time.

I don’t have a tool for making julienne strips, so I simply peeled and grated the zucchini using the coarse side of my box grater. The grated squash went into a large strainer, sprinkled lightly with salt. After 5 minutes, I pressed the water out and tossed with some pumpkin seed pesto that I picked up at Market Hall Number 9 in Berlin. A grating of fresh Parmesan cheese and we were ready to eat. If I can find vegan pesto and substitute nutritional yeast for the Parmesan, I could make this for our vegan daughter.

Lois Britton

An accountant by trade and a food blogger since 2009, Lois Britton fell in love with Polish cuisine during the years she lived in Poznań, Poland. As the creator of PolishHousewife.com,  she loves connecting readers with traditional Polish recipes. Lois has a graduate certificate in Food Writing and Photography from the University of South Florida. She is the author of The Polish Housewife Cookbook, available on Amazon and on her website.