Spaghetti

I've had a spaghetti squash sitting on my pantry since late October or November. I finally cooked it up the other day. The sauce and final treatment wasn't very good, so I'm not going to share, but I wanted to share with you my technique for cooking a spaghetti squash.

To start you need to slice the squash in half from pole to pole (top to bottom). Scrape out the seeds and stringy membrane. Once cleaned, I like to brush or rub some olive oil into the squash and season liberally with salt and pepper. This time around, I wanted to try something extra. I smashed open a garlic clove and tossed it into the center of the prepped squash. The garlic will roast and the aroma will give a hint of garlic to the squash.


With the garlic clove inside, I flipped the squash halves over onto a parchment lined baking sheet and placed them in the oven (375 degrees) for 45-50 minutes, until tender.


The squash is tender when a knife slides easily and smoothly into the flesh. That's a little devilish. Where's Dexter when you need him? Anyway, allow the squash halves to cool for a bit, covered with foil.


When you can handle the squash, take a fork and start scraping out the cooked strands of the spaghetti squash. You can serve with butter, a lite tomato sauce, an herb flavored broth or any number of other pasta sauces. I like to keep the spaghetti squash topping on the lighter side. I wouldn't use most types of cream sauce or full bodied marinara sauces. I feel they would dominate the dish and you'd lose the subtle, lightly sweet flavor of the squash.

Enjoy!