Anyone familiar with the RAW movement?  These are people who believe that food is really only nutritious when it isn’t cooked.   Raw is just one of those things that involves a heavy duty commitment and because I can’t commit to watering my plants, I doubt it is for me.   Me, in my 1950’s style ignorance-is-bliss attitude towards food is starting to hear the whispers from the Raw people and not every whisper is totally nonsense.  Some of it is actually good common sense. Yikes.

What I am mostly reacting to is a note I saw about how 51% of any diet should be raw. Anyone see that too? And here is the Uh-Oh moment I had- my little chalice of snuggles and giggles hardly ever eats raw food.  I mean she gets the grapes and cucumber finger foods like anyone else but that is pretty much it.  Most things I feed her are cooked, steamed and baked.  Perhaps I need to take it down a notch.

So I went hunting for some raw recipes that work.  I must have read about 5 books and the only thing I thought was ‘why are these cookbooks published?!’  I mean, it is kind of a stupid thought in hindsight but there isn’t any cooking in raw cuisine.  Where is the skill?  Where is the moment of amazement when products come together into something new and, well, solid.

Enough attacking raw cookbooks.  They have their place (as a doorstop) but low and behold this belligerent reader did learn something.  It introduced me to vegetable noodles. Who am I fooling, raw vegetables aren’t noodles.  At best they are peeled and diced raw vegetable or in other words exactly what they were in the first place.  However, there is something kind of fun about the concept and more importantly it will get me to my end goal so I can go back to reading Smitten Kitchen.

The below recipe offers Zucchini noodles. To be honest, prior to all my raw reading I would say this is more of a warm salad type thing. BUT I ask you, the jury, is it enough to fool a toddler? I say it is.  I say it is.  To begin with, my toddler fell for it and she is a pretty tough critic if you ask me.

This recipe takes the natural sweetness of zucchinis and offers it in two ways.  The first, lightly stewed as you would any pasta sauce.  The second is ‘raw’ and peeled into thick noodles.  These delightful little zucchini noodles will offer the fun of regular pasta but incorporate just a touch more raw.

Ingredients:

2 small onions, chopped

3 tbs olive oil

3 zucchinis, peel and chop two and leave one whole

2/3 navy beans, pre-soaked or canned because these have to be ready to go.

4 sprigs of thyme

1 bay leaf

1/4 cup water or chicken stock (optional)

Preparation:

Warm the olive oil over medium/high heat in a small pot. Add the onions and let them sweat a little.

Once the onions have softened, add the two chopped zucchinis and the navy beans. Stir and add the thyme and bay leaf.

Reduce the heat a little to medium and cover the pot.

Now the fun part begins. Take a vegetable peeler and peel off the skin of the Zucchini.  Discard. Once peeled, continue to peel the zucchini into ribbons or ‘noodles’.  If you want the noodles wider, peel the zucchini one side at a time.  If you want finer noodles, continue to turn the zucchini as you peel. 

Once you have made the ‘noodles’, check on the stewing zucchinis. The onion and zucchini should provide enough liquid to create a natural sauce.  If you find it a little dry, add a little water or broth.  The zucchinis probably need about 15-20 minutes to stew to the perfect consistency.

To serve, put the noodles around the sauce.  You may need to chop the noodles a little so that they aren’t too long for little bites.  Regardless, sit back and be amazed at the pleasures of mixing raw zucchinis with cooked ones.