Spaghetti Squash

I love cooking in the fall. The cold weather and the varieties of squash and apples in the market make me want to stay home all day to braise and bake. If you've never cooked with spaghetti squash its a really easy vegetable to cook with and can serve as a more healthy "pasta" for a variety of sauces.

Its yellow and oval shaped and found in the squash corner of the market. You can cook it a number of ways. Either split it open and roast it with a little olive oil. Or put them face down in a pan of water, cover and put in the oven. Or sprinkle some water cover with saran wrap and pop into the microwave for about 10 minutes. Whichever way you cook it when its soft enough to eat you take a fork and grate it. What comes out are thin "noodles" so to speak that look surprisingly like spaghetti and have enough structural integrity to withstand the weight of most sauces.

We often toss it with fresh pesto and serve it as a side vegetable. Although last night I made a tomato sauce with zucchini and it went beautifully with the spaghetti squash. While roasting the spaghetti squash in the over I also cut up a butternut squash and roasted that as well and tossed those on top of the pasta sauce (as opposed to mixing it in). I love the flavor of roasted butternut squash and wanted that flavor to stay pronounced which is why we didn't mix it into the sauce before serving.

What's nice about this dish is how healthy it is and how hearty and perfect it felt for a cold and rainy winter night. Hope you try using this squash sometime soon if you've never cooked with it before.