Spaghetti Squash

I was first introduced to spaghetti squash when I was on Weight Watchers a few years ago. When striving for low-point meals, variety can be hard to come by when you're a picky eater like I am. But spaghetti squash sounded like something I'd like, so we gave it a try.

After that, we made it pretty often. Since then, it has sort of fallen off our dinner radar a bit, and we went a long time without having it. Last week, when we were picking up the butternut squash to use for our butternut squash fries, we decided to pick up a couple spaghetti squash as well.

On New Year's Eve, we decided to make it so we could have a light meal before going to our party (and I'm just now getting around to posting it). It occurred to me that there are probably a lot of people who aren't familiar with spaghetti squash, so I figured I'd blog about it, even though it's not really a recipe.

Spaghetti squash is extremely simple to make. All you have to do is cut it in half, and scoop out the guts and seeds in the middle. Then, place each half into a baking pan, cut side down. Bake on 350 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour. You'll know it's done if you run a fork over the flesh and it very easily starts shredding into "spaghetti."

The consistency, however, is a bit different than actual spaghetti. It's supposed to have a little bit of a "bite" to it, so if it's a little bit on the crunchy side, it doesn't mean it's undercooked.

It's obvious how this squash got it's name.

There are many different ways to serve spaghetti squash. Our favorite way is to treat it just like spaghetti noodles, and eat it with tomato sauce and parmesan cheese.

It's actually also quite good on its own. A little parmesan cheese, maybe a little olive oil or butter/margarine... yum. I'm sure there are many other ways to eat it as well; ways that I am not even aware of!

So if you've never had it, I encourage you to give it a try. Add spaghetti squash to your healthy food menus!

Completely unrelated, but an update... OK, so that light I mentioned I was excited about getting to help improve my photos? It came today, and I'm not that impressed by it. There's nothing really wrong with it, but it's bigger and bulkier than I thought and I can't imagine actually setting it up every time I want to take a picture of a meal or something. Not convenient. I'm about 99% sure I'm going to be sending it back. Boo, back to the drawing board. I'm looking for alternatives now. Hopefully I'll be debuting much better looking nighttime photos very soon!