It would seem a rather strange combination - zucchini with pasta. Recipes for making such a dish, however, are available in the culinary notebooks of many housewives. And almost all of them are sure that such a dish deserves the right to exist. Moreover, it turns out to be quite tasty and satisfying, especially if you diversify the cooking process and add some additional ingredients to the main ingredients.
Today we will tell you in detail how to cook pasta with zucchini, and offer many interesting recipes. Let's start with the simplest.
Zucchini paste: ingredients
Speaking in Russian, we will cook elementary pasta with zucchini. To do this, we need to stock up, actually, with the pasta itself (you can take almost any, but still it is advisable to stop made from durum wheat), young zucchini (two or three small things), one onion, a 200-gram bag of the most greasy sour cream, a bunch of dill and butter (30 g is enough for cooking).
How to cook
In vegetable oil, fry the chopped onion until a pleasant golden hue. Then add the diced pulp of zucchini to it. Salt and pepper, stir thoroughly, cover with a lid and simmer on the smallest fire for about twenty minutes. Then pour sour cream into them, previously diluted with several tablespoons of ordinary water. This must be done so that it does not curl when in contact with a hot mass. Simmer for no more than 5 minutes, then add the chopped dill (anyone who likes it more sharply can add chopped garlic). Turn off the fire, leave the mixture under the lid.
Next, you need to boil the pasta. Quality products are prepared in no more than 5-7 minutes, but in order not to make a mistake, read the instructions on the package. In any case, they should be a little hard. That is half-finished. Drain water, and add oil to pasta. Gently stir. Put the paste on a plate, and add the finished zucchini on top. And of course, you can fill everything with grated cheese. It's time to the table!
Tip
Macaroni and cheese have long been a classic of the genre. Nevertheless, this dish is not always obtained the way you want. Why? Because for cooking his mistresses take the first cheese that came across. And this is fundamentally the wrong approach. You need to take only parmesan. It melts perfectly, but does not stretch unlike the others. Thanks to this, one can really enjoy eating, rather than think about how it would be more poetical to bring a fork to the mouth with a load of melted cheese hanging on it.
Modified recipe
That's what good pasta with zucchini is good, because by introducing additional ingredients you can get a completely different dish. As, for example, in the following recipe. We will continue to learn how to cook pasta with zucchini and tomatoes. However, there is no special science here. Everything is very simple, especially if you have already mastered the recipe for making the most primitive pasta.
So, as in the first case, fry the onion. Then we add to it very young squash cut by thin semicircles. Once they are fried, add the halves of cherry tomatoes (three hundred grams, not more). Pour the cream (half a glass), pour finely chopped garlic and stir, simmer for several minutes. If you like basil, you can add it. Especially goes well with this dish is purple. And then we add ready-made pasta and mix everything carefully. And almost immediately after that we turn off the fire. Pasta with zucchini and tomatoes ready. You can arrange on plates and serve. Sprinkled (remember what you said above?) With grated parmesan.
Tagliatelle with zucchini and mushrooms
If you do not know how to cook pasta with zucchini, take the following recipe. This is a great option for a tasty and quite satisfying, despite the lack of meat component, dishes.
Three hundred grams of champignon need to be cut into thin slices, and then fry for fifteen minutes in vegetable oil, pre-salted. Then add half a glass of fat cream to the mushrooms and, carefully stirring, hold on the fire for another five minutes. In parallel with this, in another pan for ten minutes, fry young zucchini sprinkled with basil and cut into strips. Boiled tagliatelle (already without water, of course), fill with a couple of spoons of butter and put on a dish. And then pour the contents of both pans mixed together.
Casserole
Pasta with zucchini can also be cooked as a casserole. The process will not take much time, but you will definitely diversify the menu, because this dish will be noticeably different from the usual pasta with sauce.
The first thing you need to boil pasta. Then send them to a colander and wait for the water to drain. In no case do you need to rinse! But forgetting them for a long time is also not recommended. Otherwise, they simply stick together. Therefore, the best thing you can do is to just stir them with a fork from time to time while you are cooking the zucchini. No problems will arise with him. Just peel and grate (coarse). Then salt and pepper, add finely chopped green onion to the mass, and then fill with a mixture of three beaten eggs and a glass of milk. Try on salt, if necessary add it. Then pour in the pasta and mix thoroughly. After that, take a baking dish, grease it with vegetable oil and put on the bottom zucchini-pasta mass. Cook in the oven for about twenty minutes. The optimum temperature is 180 degrees. Five minutes before readiness, you can take out a form and sprinkle grated cheese with plenty of casserole. In this case, the variety does not matter.
Lasagna with zucchini
Not every hostess knows that today you can find on sale special sheets for lasagna. In essence, these are the same pasta, only they are cooked in the form of peculiar layers. Thanks to them, you can make many interesting dishes. For example, lasagna in the oven. In principle, the same pasta with zucchini, only in a slightly different interpretation.
Another undoubted advantage of this dish is that it cooks very quickly. So this is a great option for those who have too little time to prepare snacks when the guests are almost at the doorstep.
Cooking
About a kilogram of peeled zucchini, grate on a coarse grater and fry for ten minutes along with a chopped onion in olive oil. Then add three cloves of garlic, 50 grams of cheddar and two thirds of a 250-gram jar of ricotta to the vegetables, crushed by a press. Stir. Cook the lasagna leaves (make sure they are not digested!). Usually it takes five minutes. Then drain the water, place the layers on the dish and sprinkle them lightly with olive oil. Then take a baking sheet, cover it with parchment, lay layers of lasagna on it, generously grease with tomato paste, cover with a zucchini mass on top. After which the manipulations must be repeated in the same order: a layer of lasagna + tomato paste + fried zucchini. Cover the last with the remaining layers of lasagna, coat the top with the remaining cheddar and send the container to the oven. Cooking time - no more than ten minutes. The optimal temperature is 180 degrees.
Pasta with zucchini and ham
In principle, all the above recipes can be called vegetarian. While not every family member agrees to eat one “grass”. By and large, in any of the proposed zucchini sauces, you can, with a little thought, add the meat component. And to make it easier for you, we offer as an example to cook delicious pasta with zucchini and ham. Yes, and in cheese sauce.
Cut one medium-sized zucchini into thin strips. Do the same with one hundred grams of lean ham. Mix half a glass of milk and cream and heat them by adding 200 grams of cream cheese. At the same time, try to stir the prepared mixture constantly. Once it boils, add another hundred grams of grated cheese. Cook until it dissolves. Add spices and half a teaspoon of nutmeg. Salting is not recommended, as the cheese itself is quite salty. Fry the zucchini for five minutes in oil, then add the ham. Cook another five minutes. And then pour the resulting sauce into this mixture (or vice versa, add it to it - it doesn’t matter). Spaghetti cooked in the traditional way (spaghetti, by the way, are best suited), put on a plate and pour the resulting sauce.
Bon Appetit!