Pasta with Zucchini

We get a lot of darned deer traipsing across our property, gleefully eating my garden and making piles of poop that I need to clear away before mowing the lawn. I am not on good terms with the deer, generally.

But tonight, this creature lay innocently in our grass, after which it communed with some baby bunnies (Thumper?), and bathed in the glow of the fireflies. For real. No movie scene could have portrayed nature more idyllically. It was sort of ridiculously magical.





So go ahead and eat my hydrangeas, Bambi. You win, at least for tonight.

Along with baby animals and fireflies, another joy of summer is an abundance of ultra-fresh, varied produce. This week I picked up some perfect zucchini from the farmer's market and put them to use in tonight's dinner.



Prompted by one of the commenters on this NYT Cooking recipe (subscription required) for "Spaghetti With Zucchini, Parsley Pesto and Bottarga," I made a key change, and it turned out well: instead of bottarga, I made an olive-based vegan pasta topper from Serious Eats. The olive mix only took about 2 hours to dry out in the oven, not the 5 (!) indicated in the recipe. If you do this, the whole recipe is vegan.

I used linguine rather than spaghetti, and kept the pepper flakes to a bare minimum (but was still glad I included them).


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