Couve Chips and Zucchini Pasta Sauce

Those who know me know that I am most at peace, and therefore, most creative when I'm in the kitchen cooking; I'm always looking for healthier and interesting ways to cook vegetables and would like to share a couple of my recent discoveries on this blog entry. 

During my time at the University of Miami one of my closest friends, an Italian girl, one day made me the most exquisite zucchini pasta sauce that I had ever tasted.   This weekend with a very oversized, organic zucchini I recreated the dish a little healthier than the original but equally delicious.  

The original dish requires you to wash and peel the zucchini and shallow fry the cut medallions in hot olive oil.  I don't like frying things, it makes a huge mess and you use a lot oil, which doesn't come cheap in Brazil, so I decided to roast the medallions in the oven with just a drizzle of olive oil over the top, also, I didn't bother to peel the zucchini as it was organic and felt that the skin could only add a nice flavour.  So as to minimise the washing up, I also roasted 5 unpeeled garlic cloves and some chopped up onion in the same roasting pan.  For flavour I threw in some bay leaves and sea salt on top of the zucchini and left it all to roast in a hot oven.  

Once everything was roasted I put the zucchini, onions, and peeled garlic cloves in the blender and blitzed it into a pale green creamy sauce.  I added a little white wine as liquid to help the blender get going..... result delicious.  

I think the best use of this creamy sauce is fill up oversized pasta shells

Another healthy snack that I made this weekend was a variation on kale chips.   I'm not sure if you can get kale in Brazil, so I opted to use couve instead and it worked out great!!

The most important element to this great, healthy beer snack is a very hot oven and very dry couve leaves.  Wash, dry well and cut out the stems of the couve, tear the leaves up into a roasting dish and drizzle olive oil and sprinkle sea salt on top, pop in the oven and wait to they get nice a crispy. They don't take long so don't leave them.  Take out of the oven eat with a cold beer, chips with out the guilt!!