Oodles of Zoodles

After my relative success with using mandoline-sliced zucchini as a replacement for noodles in lasagna, I decided to look into additional recipes that used these vegetable in place of pasta.  That's when the term zoodles became part of my vocabulary.  I guess technically zoodles are any type of veggie that has been spiraled into long thin strands, like noodles.  But because of zucchini's ability to take on the flavors of whatever is cooked with it, that's where I focused my search.
This is the zoodle slicer I bought from amazon, and I started pinning recipes on Pinterest.  This weekend I made some zoodles!
Italian is my biggest pasta weakness, but I happened upon an Asian-inspired zoodle dish in which I had most of the ingredients in my kitchen so started with that.
After mixing up a dressing/sauce made up of soy sauce, rice vinegar, Sriracha sauce, garlic, peanut butter, and sesame oil, the zucchinis were zoodled.

 I wasn't quite sure how easy the peeler would be to use.  But it was very easy, smooth even.  The zucchini is twisted inside while the gadget slices the flesh of it, leaving just the core. 

After getting the hang of it, things went quite quick and I was left with miles and miles of zoodles. Afterwards they needed to be cut into shorter lengths in order to be more manageable.  Since this was really an experiment, I also did half the noodles thicker and the other half thin, just to see if one did better than the other.
Since I wanted a noodle-like consistency the zoodles were sautéed in a little olive oil for a couple of minutes.

Zucchini releases tons of water when cooked.  When I make the lasagna the slices have to be sweated with salt first and then baked in the oven to dry them out as much as possible.  Fairly quickly, the zoodles were cooking with a lot of liquid.  That made them a bit waterlogged and heavy.

After draining each batch as best as could be managed, I added chicken breast, a handful of peanuts, some sesame seeds, and the dressing.

The thinner noodles sopped up the liquid quite a lot and while they tasted just fine, they were very heavy and didn't mix up as well.  Plus, they watered down the dressing a bit.  

After my experiment, I am pleasantly surprised (not with the photos which are unfortunately not very appetizing).  It was not the prettiest meal, but it tasted really good.  They were made to pack in my lunch this week, but I did do a small taste test of each size noodle.  They were still warm after sautéing.  For lunches, I ate them cold.  Both were good, and as I had hoped, the zucchini really took on the flavor of the other ingredients.  Other than a slight al dente crunch, you'd never know they weren't actually noodles.  My work husband even tried some yesterday and couldn't believe they were zoodles.  He went home and bought the peeler as well.

I'm going to have to do some research on how to get the softer texture I prefer without them giving off so much water, but I will definitely make zoodles again!