Let's face it: even if you love cooking and you're in the best of spiritual and mental states, cooking every day can become arduous and, far too often, repetitive. We've all heard of friends' experiences (or had our own experiences) of living in a household where there were only 6 distinct meals that repeated every week. I'm not decrying using tried and true recipes, nor am I wanting to shame people who only know (or care to know) how to cook a few things, but, for many of us, that repetition can become fucking soul-crushing. Some of us crave variety.
I am an unashamed carnivore. Look at previous posts and you'll see that clearly. However, I still love me some veggies, and, every now and again, a vegan meal just truly hits the spot. I saw a video a couple of weeks ago featuring zucchini noodles that I thought looked amazing, so I bought a couple zucchini this week at Kroger. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), I only half-paid attention to the video when I watched it, and I couldn't find it again after spending nearly 4 minutes on Google, so I had to kind of play it all by ear.
I busted out my mandolin slicer that's been sitting in the back of my pantry for...shit...6 years? Anyway, I pulled it out and used it to slice some of my squash into "noodles." The main thing I remembered from the video was that I needed to pat the "noodles" dry (not pressing hard), so I laid out some paper towels and did that.
I also made a little dressing for the zucchini out of 2 parts soy sauce, 2 parts apple cider vinegar, 2 parts honey, 1 part sesame oil, a touch of kosher salt, a few cracks of black pepper, and a couple shakes of toasted sesame seeds. I tossed the zucchini in that sauce and let it sit while I did everything else.
While I still had my mandolin out, I used it to cut a few slices off of a sweet potato. I wanted to fry it into chips, but had the brilliant (and perfectly timed) thought that I should blanch them first. Blanching is a process where you boil the ingredient for a short amount of time, then quickly cool it off, either by putting it into iced water or run under cold water to stop it from continuing to cook. I boiled the slices for about 2 minutes with some salt, then just poured my pot into a strainer and ran the potato under a cold tap, tossing a little to make sure all of it got cooled.
I then patted the potato slices dry so that, when I fried them in oil, it wouldn't spit boiling hellfire all over my face. Then I heated up some veggie oil and fried the potatoes until they got just a touch crispy.
Once they were cooked, I removed them from the pan, patted them dry (very fucking carefully - you can burn the shit out of yourself trying to manhandle recently fried anything). I had rinsed and dried the pot I boiled the slices in, so I dumped them back in there with some kosher salt, black pepper, and ground cumin, then tossed it all around to get a nice, light coating.
Since everything so far was going so quickly and efficiently, I decided that I really needed to be extra about how I plated everything, so I busted out the little wooden sushi rolling mat that's been sitting in my silverware drawer for...shit...5 years? I put some saran wrap over it so I wouldn't get sauce on the wood (I squeezed the sauce out the end and it got on the wood, but it at least wasn't soaked), then kind of rolled/squeezed the zucchini into a nice-ish cylinder.
Still, everything ended up looking pretty baller. I laid the zucchini diagonally on my plate flanked by a few of the sweet potato chips, then laid some thinly sliced cherry tomatoes along the top. Super tasty, light (which is good on 95 degree summer days), decently healthy, honestly kind of pretty, and a great way to show off to a lady that you've got a not-fried-chitlins side to your meal preparation.
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