Before today, the last time I had spaghetti squash for dinner with homemade red sauce was probably 5 or 6 years gone back. I vaguely remember having trouble splitting the giant gourd in half to cook it and then not really being all that satisfied with its texture when compared to actual pasta. It was like angel hair pasta if it were wheat, grainy, and stuck together with slime.
To say the least, I was disappointed.
I cooked some more spaghetti squash today because I'm a masochist, apparently. I started eating ketogenically about two months ago, eating no more than 30 grams of carbohydrates per day. I count my carbs carefully and even a few ounces of pasta puts me over my entire daily limit, so that was straight out.
Yet here I was with a bunch of stunning homemade sauce* and nothing to put it on.
Spaghetti squash to the rescue?
Looking at the large yellow gourd the size of my head I grabbed my chef's knife and went to work. Strangely, this one split in two with just a few quick pulls of the knife and was a cinch to split then clean of its seeds and entrails. I threw it in the oven, cut-side-down, and baked it at 350 degrees (F) for an hour.
I scored it out of its shell, threw some sauce on it and dug in, wondering if I once again had made a colossal mistake.
The only mistake I've made is in not eating spaghetti squash for the past 5 or 6 years.
It was delicious. Sure, it wasn't actually anything at all like pasta but after two months without pasta I don't have much of anything to compare it to; without that comparison the spaghetti squash was amazing and I'll be having more of it whenever I can find it at the store, especially as I still have a lot of sauce left.
My suggestion would be to try spaghetti squash. It's simple to cook, has a mildly nutty flavor that enhances the pasta sauce somehow, and a tiny bit of sweetness to it without being overpowering. Don't expect it to be like pasta; it's definitely its own thing. It satisfied my craving for something pasta-like.
Enjoy!
*I'm teaching a friend to cook and my red sauce recipe was the first step.
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