Spaghetti Squash Recipe

I've been wanting to try Spaghetti Squash forever it seems. I've seen it on all kinds of cooking shows, but I've never been able to find it in any store here. Yesterday on our "Grocery Shopping Gone Wild" trip, we were buying some things in the produce section and I turned around and saw the Spaghetti Squash! And .. it was only $.89

I had to do some research to figure out exactly how to cook these crazy things, but it really wasn't hard at all.

First of all, this is what a spaghetti squash looks like:

The first step is to poke holes with a fork all over the squash so that it doesn't explode when you cook it. Then pre-heat oven to 375 degrees and bake the whole squash for 1 hour. I turned mine halfway through.

Meanwhile I made my spaghetti sauce, which is really pretty much just basic meat sauce, but I'll tell you what I did anyway. I used 1 1/4 pound very lean ground beef (93% lean), a tablespoon of minced garlic, 1/2 onion chopped, and 1 large zucchini chopped. I like to add in extra veggies wherever possible.

I sauteed this mixture until the beef was all browned and the zucchine started to get soft. Then I added in 1 jar of spaghetti sauce. I let the sauce simmer on low heat for the whole time the squash was baking.

After 1 hour I removed the squash from the oven, sliced vertically and spooned out all the seeds from the middle.

Once the seeds were removed, I used a fork to gently pull out the strands of the squash.

Top the "noodles" with the meat sauce like you normally would. The texture is a little bit different from real noodles, so you won't fool anyone into thinking they are noodles. But they have essentially no flavor, so it doesn't interfere with the flavor of the sauce at all.

Tim and I both really liked this recipe. I served the spaghetti with a small side salad and we were both pleasantly full.

I was really suprised at the amount of "noodles" you can get out of one squash. I had almost half a squash left after serving us both fairly big portions. I don't know how it will keep in the refrigerator for reheating, but I'm gonna give it a try.