This recipe was developed as part of a partnership between Bariatric Foodie and Celebrate Vitamins. Here on Bariatric Foodie you’ll find pictures and helpful recipe hints, then use the button at the bottom of this post to click through to the Celebrate Vitamins website to view and download the recipe, complete with nutrition information!

So here’s a very real fear of mine.

When I make a recipe that reminds me a lot of a food from a particular food tradition…I get kinda nervous to say that. I have heard of cultural appropriation before…but is there such thing as recipe appropriation? I dunno. But every time I mention a specific style of cooking I feel like someone who is from that culture or background will email me and say, “YOU PHONY!”

(Stop laughing…that’s a legit worry of mine!)

I tell you this because the sauce for this dish…to me…tastes a lot like moussaka. Have you ever had it before?

It’s a Mediterranean dish (Greek?) and I’ve only had it a few times. From what I remember there was beef and a tomato sauce, and potatoes and vegetables, but the thing I remember most was that there was cinnamon and nutmeg in the sauce. WOWZA!

Now admittedly this confused my American brain for a minute. In American cooking those two spices are almost exclusively used in sweet foods and so my brain sorta expected dessert for a nano-second. But I’m pretty varied in my eating. I adjusted fairly quickly!

So that’s one awesome thing about this dish.

The other is that this is it, Foodies. This is my official pumpkin offering for the year! I may do a few more. I reserve the right to. But we can add this to our pumpkin chili, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin protein shake, pumpkin turtle protein shake, protein pumpkin bread and…any other recipe I am forgetting on this site that has pumpkin in it.

This year I wanted to add to the savory repertoire. And I also wanted to use zoodles because…well…I been kinda all about zoodles lately with the release of Oodles of Zoodles. Plus…this particular zoodle method is one I did not learn until after I finished the book and it was one of those, “why the heck didn’t I think of that???” moments.

Ravioli. Well…sorta. My friend Margaret took one look at the shots of this dish and went, “That is not ravioli!”

I would be inclined to agree but I think this falls under the “What else are we gonna call it?” category. Plus…everyone else on Pinterest and beyond is calling it ravioli so who am I to argue with the interwebz.

The filling was pretty traditional: a little ricotta, a little Parm, a little salt, some white pepper, an egg. The sauce is the breakout hit here. In general, pumpkin has a sort of flat flavor (which is why we tend to add cinnamon and nutmeg to it!), so in this case I added the spices as well as a little tomato paste to give it some zing. Warning: the sauce is THICK. Like thick-thick. That made this recipe a bit challenging to photograph. It took a great deal of effort for the pics not to look like zoodle ravioli floating in cat food. (No, I am not kidding!) But there are lots of foods that taste wonderful but don’t photograph well so I forgive myself for that.

At any rate, hop on over to the Celebrate website and get the downloadable version of the recipe, with nutrition information. And if you make it, let me know what you think of the sauce!

Gimme that Recipe!