pasta with miso-walnut-parsley pesto, roasted zucchini, and basil

This recipe, slightly adapted from Dishing Up the Dirt, is simple, but something I make at least a few times every summer: a very green, very vegetal maybe-pasta-salad-maybe-just-pasta. Basically, the recipe is a celebration of two principles:

• Roasting any vegetable makes it better.
• You can pesto just about anything. Basil, pine nuts and parmesan are traditional, but also just a template.
  

vegetarian/vegan?

Yes, vegan as is. The original recipe had smoked salmon but that adds a lot of salt if you're using miso.

ingredients

pesto (feel free to adjust proportions, I usually eyeball it):

• 1 generous tablespoon of miso paste. The recipe calls for white/shiro miso, but I've used red miso when that's what I had on hand, and it also works.
• 1/4 to 1/3 cup of walnuts.
• 1/4 cup of olive oil.
• 2-4 cloves of garlic (the original recipe uses 2; 4 may be pushing things but I've done it)
• A large bunch of parsley.
• A glug or two of lemon juice (at the risk of actually having made salsa verde)
• Some amount of black pepper.

other:

• A box of pasta, preferably something like fusilli to catch the pesto.
• 2-4 medium to large zucchini.
• Some amount of basil, and any remaining parsley.
• More black pepper, olive oil, and maybe some red pepper flakes.

directions

1. Blend the pesto ingredients in a food processor, tasting as you go to make sure the proportions work.
   Your pesto will probably taste very strong at this point and will be very thick. Don't worry too much;
   you'll water it down later, and there's plenty of pasta and zucchini to cover.
   You'll probably have leftovers, but I trust you can figure out something to do with pesto.
2. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Chop the zucchini into fairly thick chunks -- small enough that they'll brown well, but thick enough that they'll keep their structural integrity and not fall apart into strings.
3. Toss the zucchini with some olive oil (not too much), black pepper, and possibly red pepper flakes. Spread out on 1 or 2 baking sheets lined with foil (you'll probably need 2), and place in the oven to roast.
4. Check the zucchini after 10 minutes or so, and flip the pieces once they've browned on the side facing down.
   (The zucchini in the photo is probably a little undercooked, I was impatient.)
5. Pasta: The basic drill: boil water, add pasta to water, cook until done.
   I probably would not salt the water too much if at all here because the pesto is quite salty; that being said, I way overcompensated the last time and needed to add salt at the end, so your call.
6. Once the pasta and zucchini are both finished, drain most (but not all) of the water from the pot of pasta.
   Add some amount of pesto to the pasta and stir; the remaining water will thin it into a sauce.
7. Toss the roasted zucchini in as well, and add the basil and/or remaining parsley sprigs.
   Optionally, sprinkle some more pepper or red pepper flakes over the top, or add another glug of leftover pesto.

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