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