I love pasta. Boy do I love pasta. I wish that I could eat it every day because there is so much variation in pasta. Unfortunately, I can’t eat it everyday otherwise I’d gain too many pounds. People have told me that spaghetti squash is a great alternative to the delicious carbohydrated pasta. So I decided I would try it.
Boy was I surprised how delicious it turned out. It could have been the sauce I made but man was it good. I look forward to the leftovers tomorrow for lunch!
Spaghetti Squash Pasta Dish
Ingrediants & Supplies:
For the Sauce:
1 tablespoon olive oil (plus more to drizzle on squash)
1 medium sized onion, diced
1 tomato, diced
1/4 cup or less goat cheese
5 cremini mushrooms, sliced
2-3 stocks of ends from beets*
2 cups fresh spinach
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 teaspoon dried basil
1/4 teaspoon thyme
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
For the Pasta:
1 medium sized butternut squash
Directions:
Preheat oven to 375° F
While the oven preheats, cut the spaghetti squash in half and spoon out the seeds and pulp like you would a pumpkin. Once the oven is preheated set the squash on a tray and drizzle with olive oil then put it in the oven.**
Bake the squash for 30 minutes or until tender so that you can put a fork through the squash and remove it easily.
While the squash is baking cut up your vegetables to prepare for cooking. Once your vegetables are sliced/diced, bring a medium sized pan to medium heat on the stove and sauté the the onions, beet ends, and mushrooms in the 1 Tbsp of olive oil for 2 minutes. Add the tomato and spinach and sauté for another minute or so. Add the thyme, salt, pepper, basil, and garlic to the vegetables and mix in. Cook vegetables for a minute or so more until everything is tender.
By the time the vegetables are done the squash should be ready to pull out of the oven. Remove vegetables from heat and briefly reheat when the squash is ready.
Once you’ve pulled the squash out of the oven take two forks and pull at the squash as if to make the squash stringy. Once you’ve strung out all of the squash, dish it up atop with the vegetable mixture and serve with goat cheese.***
Cooks Notes:
*I made a dish the previous night where I boiled some beets and cauliflower and then served it over rice. I saved the ends to the beets which consists of the stock and the leaves and in this dish I diced the stocks like you would celery until 3/4 of the way up to the leaf.
**When I baked my squash I decided to add water to the bottom of the tray I cooked it in. However, you can omit this and bake it without water.
***You can also microwave the squash before adding the vegetable topping to cook it if you feel like it tastes too hard. I recommend you cook the squash in the microwave no more than 2 minutes after you have baked it in the oven for 30 minutes.