Spaghetti Squash
In a Hurry?
- Baste squash halves with oil
- Add pepper and salt
- Roast in an oven
- Scrape out the flesh and add spaghetti sauce
There I was, feeling a bit peckish, thinking about that honey melon in the fridge. I grabbed it, took my kitchen knife and started cutting, wondering about that big stem and how hard it was to cut it in half. Well, it turns out that I have no clue when it comes to fruit or vegetables. I was cutting into spaghetti squash, not into some honey melon. Of course, I didn’t want to let it go to waste and had to look up how to deal with it and found a plethora of recipes. Most of them tell you to treat the squash as spaghetti and add something you would add to spaghetti as well. Impatient, as I usually am, I picked up ideas for ingredients on the handful of websites that I had visited in the process. I had a plan for the sauce: Onions, garlic, tomatoes and the green onions I had left from that orange chicken experiment.
Preparing the squash is simple. Most of the websites suggested roasting it in the oven. That’s what I did. Cut the spaghetti squash in half, scrape out the seeds and soft bits with a spoon. Baste the cut side and the scraped out core with some olive oil and add salt and pepper. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and place both halves on it, cut side down. Roast it for about 40 minutes at 400 degrees.
For my sauce, I diced a small onion, chopped some garlic into pieces, opened a can of diced tomatoes and sliced my green onions. I did have fresh tomatoes, but I somehow hate to cook them. They usually go into a salad or get sliced for a burger or a sandwich. 30 minutes into the roasting of the squash, I started to sautee the onions in oil, added the garlic and a bit later, I added the diced tomatoes. I waited for this to cook through and added the green onions at the end, not giving them any chance to get soft or even burn.
I took out the baking sheet and turned the squash around. There was steam coming out from underneath the squash, but I could avoid it. The fork went into the squash without resistance and I started scraping the flesh out and transferred it onto the plates. I added my sauce and topped it with some grated cheese. Good stuff. The squash had a slightly sweet and nutty flavor and was a bit crunchy, call it al-dente. It’s quite nice as a summer dish, certainly not as heavy as the typical winter squash.
- 1 Spaghetti Squash
- 1 Onion
- 14.5 oz can of diced tomatoes
- 3 cloves of garlic
- 1 bundle of green onions
- Cut the squash in half and remove seeds with a spoon
- Baste the cut and core with oil and add pepper and salt
- Place face down on a baking sheet lined with aluminum foil
- Roast for 40 minutes at 400F
- Dice the onion and chop the garlic
- Sautee onion and garlic 2-3 minutes
- Add diced tomatoes and let it cook for 5 minutes
- Add sliced green onions and warm it up 2 minutes max
- Take the sauce off the heat
- Test the squash with a fork
- If there is no resistance, scrape out the flesh with a fork and transfer it onto plates
- Add the sauce
- Top it with grated cheese
Nutella empanada (improved)
I’d rather post something about my own cooking experiments, but there haven’t been that many lately due to much eating out. Which is a valid cook like a guy strategy. But here’s a link I’d like to let you know about: Nutella empanada (improved).
Migas
If I stumble across an article titled Cooking for Noobs: The Easiest Dinner You’ll Ever Cook during my daily research for this blog, I have to go there and read it. I didn’t realize it was Migas the author was talking about. What confused me was the fact that the author said dinner. I have two stepsons living in Texas, and that’s what they have for breakfast and so did I when I visted them. In any case, the recipe has made it onto my To Do list, as soon as I have tortillas, or even soft tortilla chips in the house.
Orange Chicken
In a Hurry?
- Forget about it, it's way to complicated
- TL;DC too long, don't cook
Here’s another success story! Not! For a couple of days now I’ve been thinking about chicken recipes. And I actually tried some of them: Last week I had chicken breast marinated in a lemon juice and olive oil mix. The result was interesting, but nothing much to talk about. Later, I tried myself on a honey mustard chicken in the crock pot. That got way to dry and left a sticky mess in the crock pot. And today, I found this: Orange Chicken. Sounds easy, especially if you have experimented with orange and lemon sauces before.
But once I had lined up the ingredients, I started to get annoyed. For starters the recipe asked to batter the chicken pieces and then deep fry them. I have trouble breading chicken breasts and pork chops, because it is such a slow process. My ADD keeps me from rolling two dozen pieces of chicken in egg and flour and then slowly drop them into the oil. I just put the pieces in a plastic bag, added some flour, salt and pepper, rolled it around for a while and pan fried it.
What’s worse is the sauce. Go back to the recipe’s list of ingredients where it says Orange sauce and start counting. A dozen different ingredients, and water even twice: Orange and lemon juice, soy sauce, vinegar, I am not going to repeat the list here. It’s a recipe not fit for this blog. Even if it turned out well. Ginger actually helped with that. If you really want to give something an Asian touch, add ginger. Soy sauce is just not subtle enough. And the recipe actually helped me getting closer to conquer the rice. But that’s for a post somewhere down the road, once the results stabilize.