Low Carb Spiralized Yellow Squash Noodles with Tomatoes, Pesto, and Parmesan is where salad meets pasta! You can feel like you’re indulging, but really just chowing down veggies.

If you’re craving something fresh, light, and full of flavor, this Low Carb Spiralized Yellow Squash Noodles with Tomatoes, Pesto, and Parmesan will be your new best friend. Especially if you want to eat healthy, but you’re secretly stifling some hardcore cravings for carby things like pasta.

This dish tastes like a bowl of pesto pasta, but with the added sweetness of fresh, ripe tomatoes and salty nuttiness from cheese. Because I used my pistachio cilantro pesto, I garnished this dish with pistachios and cilantro. However, if you use a traditional basil pesto you could top these yellow squash noodles with fresh basil and pine nuts. For the paleo and vegan version, just omit the cheese!

Spiralized Vegetable Salad

If you haven’t yet joined the spiralizer craze, let me tell you that I also held out for as long as I could and I came up with every excuse in the book as to why I didn’t jump on the bandwagon. Once I finally bit the bullet and bought a spiralizer and then figured out how to work it properly, I’ve been a spiralizing fool, lol.

If you want switch up your salad routine, just spiralize a bunch of different veggies (such as cabbage, carrot, onion, cucumber, etc.), dress it simply with lemon juice or oil and vinegar, season with salt and pepper, and top with a handful of your favorite fresh herb. You’ll want to eat it every day and the best part is, you can keep it exciting by using different vegetable combinations every time.

The Best Vegetables to Make Into Noodles with a Spiralizer

I love playing around to find new veggies to spiralizer! Here are a few of my favorites:

• Cucumber: Cucumber noodles are perfect for using in a refreshing light salad dressed with oil and vinegar.
• Onion: As soon as I realized I could spiralize onion, I started doing it all the time. Spiralized onion works well in a lot of salads, and can easily be made into pickled onions for topping burgers, hot dogs, sausage, chili, etc. I haven’t played around with it yet, but I’m thinking up a mac and cheese-type dish with spiralized onion.
• Sweet potato: Sweet potato makes gorgeous sturdy noodles! You can use them in a vinaigrette-dressed salad or gently tossed with red tomato sauce or creamy alfredo-type sauce.
• Yellow summer squash: I recently discovered how much I love spiralized yellow squash noodles because they have an al dente texture without cooking. Yellow summer squash noodles are just a touch sturdier than zucchini noodles, which I like because they don’t soften quite as quickly as zoodles do. Also, because summer squash is light-colored it simulates regular pasta very well (because we eat with our eyes first).
• Zucchini: Zoodles are extremely convenient because they have perfect texture without the need for cooking. Zucchini noodles are usually my go-to when I’m craving spaghetti and meatballs with red sauce.

How Long to Cook Spiralized Noodles

Here are the cooking times for a few common vegetable noodles:

• Carrot: Most frequently, I leave carrot raw and add it to a salad. Occasionally, I sauté them for about 3 to 5 minutes in a sauce or with other veggies.
• Cucumber: I find there’s no need to cook cucumber noodles. They start off with great texture and because of their high liquid content, they naturally release water and soften fairly quickly as they sit or if they’re tossed with vinaigrette.
• Sweet potato: Sweet potato noodles are best if they’re briefly cooked after spiralizing. I boil mine about 3 to 5 minutes, and sometimes after that I’ll sauté them briefly so they take on a little color. I also love roasting sweet potato noodles (425F for about 10 minutes, tossing once halfway through) to simulate sweet potato fries.
• Yellow summer squash: I don’t usually cook yellow summer squash; however, if you really want to, you can sauté it briefly in a hot skillet (just 1 to 3 minutes). Any longer than that and the noodles start to lose their noodle-like shape and become mushy.
• Zucchini: I handle zucchini the same way as yellow summer squash.

Other Yellow Summer Squash Recipes:

• 20-Minute Thai-Inspired Summer Vegetable Curry with Seared Salmon from An Edible Mosaic
• Garlic Parmesan Yellow Squash Chips from Diethood
• Taco Stuffed Summer Squash Boats from Smile Sandwich
• Summer Squash Soup from Naturally Ella

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