For those who are into the clean eating lifestyle, giving up grains (especially pasta) is rough. Watching your roommates devour spaghetti with pesto and oozing cheese hurts you inside a little bit. This was me, until I discovered spaghetti squash last year. But sometimes, the time needed to cut the hard squash in half, scoop out the seeds, and microwave the squash until soft is more time than I am willing to allocate to a meal.
Enter spiralizers. This nifty little tool resembles a hybrid of a pencil sharpener and an hourglass. They are extremely easy and fast to use.
1. Select your vegetable of choice. My personal favorite is zucchini, but you can also use potatoes, carrots, cucumbers, or butternut squash.
Photo by Jen Berger
2. Put vegetable into the spiralizer and twist, as if you were sharpening a pencil.
Photo by Jen Berger
That’s it. Your noodles are done.
Check out this infomercial for the Veggetti, the Spiralizer I have and love.
Note: If you’re making a soup or pasta, microwave noodles until soft.
Vegetable noodles are extraordinarily versatile. They can be used in soup, as pasta, in salads, or even in waffles. One of my favorite blogs for recipes using spiralizers, Inspiralized, has a great list of the best beginner recipes for the spiralizer.
Spiralizers are extremely affordable, most are under $15 on Amazon and are available for free shipping.
Here are some great noodle/pasta recipes that can be adapted to use with veggie noodles: