Winter squash

This all started a few weeks ago when I was on my way into the local Rainbow Foods. As is the case at many grocery stores this time of year they had a display of locally grown winter squash near the entrance. I like squash, I am familiar with at least a couple summer squashes and I have often in the past prepared acorn squash, which is a winter squash. I was looking at the acorn squash when my eye was caught by the label on the big yellow squash, clearly a squash with which I had zero familiarity and which I had never ever prepared.

You might be able to read the label if you magnify the photo but here is what it says:

Spaghetti Squash: Cut squash in half, remove seeds, then bake at 350 (degrees) for 45 minutes. Remove strands with a fork. Toss lightly with butter, salt and pepper. Season to taste with parmesan or Italian seasonings."

I was intrigued by "remove strands(?) with a fork" and "Italian seasonings". I bought one. I baked it up one night while we were having, if I recall correctly, meat loaf. Sure enough, strands. We flavored it with butter and parmesan cheese and we both decided we liked it.

I went ahead and got another one and we took the hint given in the name of the squash and in the recipe directions and prepared a simple mostly canned spaghetti sauce. Again we both decided we liked it.

Today was a rainy and wet day, too cold to do much of anything, including the raking that we intended to do today. Instead we rounded up the ingredients again and set out to make Squash Spaghetti.

I have found that 45 minutes while the squash is baking is plenty of time to do the sauce. Therefore squash preparation comes first.

Here is a preparation tip which I found some place other than on the label, probably on the intertubes. You don't want to just lay the squash down and saw your way through. The texture of the squash makes that a difficult and possibly dangerous approach. Puncture the thing with a long sharp knife and then work your way around.

Again, that's more or less the way you approach the first cut on a pumpkin.

Look familiar?

Clean that all up and deposit the two halves on the center rack of the oven. No baking sheet or any thing of that sort required.

I learned most of the things I know about cooking long, long ago while I was a single man. I learned that if you can cook the whole deal in a single pan there will only be one pan to clean up after you are done. TOPWLH now does most of the clean up (hey, I do the cooking) and I bet she agrees that fewer pans is better than lots of pans.

So, one big pan, a medium large yellow onion cut into pieces, not diced, not chopped, I like onion, I want to able to taste a piece when I bite into it. But onion takes the longest to cook of the things going into the single pan, it comes first.

Next comes a large green pepper, cut into medium size pieces. See above for the reasons for choosing medium size pieces.

I just throw them right on top of the onions. The onions are moving along towards the state that I want them in for this sauce, the green pepper will take a little less time but my life cooking experience tells me that these two will both be cooked the way I want them to be cooked by the time I am done.

But, they are not cooked enough yet to just be allowed to be in the pan while I am browning the hamburger. It is a large pan so I sequester the onions and peppers and start cooking hamburger in the other half of the pan.

As soon as the hamburger is moving along pretty close to "browning" I add the most delicate ingredient, the one that is going to take the least amount of time to cook to the level that I want.

I know that all of the cooking guides say "saute the mushrooms". That works really well. This also works, at least it works for me. After a bit the parts start getting smooshed together and it starts to look like this.

The only thing missing from that sequence is when the meat looks sufficiently browned and all of the other pieces look sufficiently reduced I add the jar of sauce.

How do I define "sufficiently" as in "sufficiently browned" and "sufficiently reduced"? Cooking is an art, not a science.

OK, then, here comes the fun part. The squash comes out of the oven looking for all the world like, what? squash?

But, when you go after it with a fork it comes out in STRANDS!

It was a pretty large squash, we ended up with a couple of bowls of strands.

To which we added the simple spaghetti sauce giving us a meal of Squash Spaghetti.

We both love pasta, this will never completely replace pasta. But, it is good and it offers some dietary advantages over pasta. Very low carbs.

It smells good, it looks good, it is good.