Zucchini Sticks and Pasta with Herb Sauce

Here we have a lovely zucchini straight from ChezVCK garden! Those snap peas are also from the garden!

Watch out, zucchini. I'm gonna eat you!

Here is the zucchini stick-making assembly line. Fried zucchini is a very delicious food that I would love to consume. However, eating fried food makes my pants very angry. In protest, they refuse to fit me anymore. So, I have adapted fried zucchini in a different way, making it taste like fried zucchini without actually frying it. (Ssshh... don't tell my pants.)

Instead of dredging the zuke slices in egg, as is typical, I just used a bit of vegetable stock to make sure the breading adhered. This saves some calories too!

After I dredged the zuke sticks in the veggie stock, I dipped them in a mixture of Italian bread crumbs and grated parmesan cheese.

See?
Then I put them all into neat little rows on a cookie sheet sprayed with a little cooking spray, so they won't stick.

And this is how they turned out after a short stint in a hot oven. I think it was about 15 minutes at 400 or so.
I served the zucchini sticks alongside some whole wheat pasta and a tofurkey dog. For the pasta, I made a simple pesto-like sauce. I grabbed some fresh herbs from my garden--chives, basil and oregano--and buzzed it all together in the food processor with some olive oil, veggie stock and good ol' S&P. It was really simple and really tasty. Finished with more parmesan cheese, it was done!

De-lish!