Gray Squash Pasta

The Korean grocery store across the street from my office sells a lot of "Gray Squash" and some zucchini.  The gray squash is much better priced and looks a lot fresher than the zucchini, so last time I was there I decided to give the gray squash a try.   This is what it looks like:

I also decided to finally break out the spiral slicer I bought more than a year ago.  Until now I have just been using an julienne peeler, but that gets a little tedious if you want to do more than one or two squash.  This week, I decided to make a big batch of "pasta" to have in the fridge to take to work for lunch (I add in a little avocado and tomato, salt and cayenne pepper ... it's delish!!). 

You can see here what the spiralizer looks like with some zucchini noodles in it:

My review?  I like the "pasta" better from the peeler - the "spaghetti" is a bit thicker.  With this spiral slicer, the results were inconsistent.  I got some perfect strands of "angel hair" pasta, but also a bunch of very thin slices that looked like they were just scored where they should have been cut to make the pasta.

Here's the bowl of pasta I have in the fridge for lunch:

All that said, using this thing, even if the results are not perfect, was sooo easy, I'll definitely be using this spiral slicer a bunch in the future.  I did a little googling today to see if I made a mistake in getting this particular type of slicer (the Joyce Chen spiral slicer).  Turns out the issue I had with the spaghetti not really being spaghetti is a fairly common issue.  

I also did a little searching for discussions on Raw Food talk and apparently the Cuisinart food processors have an attachment you can get to make spiral noodles in seconds right in the food processor!  I don't have a food processor yet, but I have a Cuisinart food processor saved in my Amazon cart to buy when I feel ready to spend more money on raw appliances.  For now, I've just been using my Vita-Mix - it seems to work in place of a food processor for most recipes I've been making.  But there are definitely lots of recipes that a food processor would do better & be much easier to clean. 

All that said, this was a pretty inexpensive tool for about $30 and definitely worth it for me to be able to make fast and easy noodles - I love the zucchini noodles!!

And by the way - the gray squash tastes pretty much exactly like zucchini - at least to me!!  I'll buy it again.