A Culinary Adventure

You may remember that I purchased a spaghetti squash and some butternut squash on our trip to the pumpkin farm.  Both of these are new to me.  I may have had a baked butternut squash when I was a youngster, but I had only heard about spaghetti squash.  And so I began a culinary adventure and want to share it with you.  First I had to have a recipe.  I searched online until I came up with this one.

Bubba cut the squash in half for me. He said that it was hard to cut and thought that it would take a long time to get tender.   It was packed with big flat seeds and stringy stuff.  After consulting the internet, I learned that all of this should be scraped out with a spoon.  Then I placed the squash cut side down on a baking sheet for thirty minutes at 350 degrees.  I was able to easily pierce it with a fork when I took it out of the oven.

Then I sauteed onion and garlic in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil.  It was smelling wonderful and looked promising.

I chopped up two fresh tomatoes that smelled flavorful which is unusual for this time of year.  I stirred them in with the onions and garlic just until they were warm.

Then I scooped the "meat" from the squash.  Guess what -- it does look like spaghetti.  It was smooth like a melon on the inside before I baked it.  I added it to the onion, garlic, and tomato mixture.

The recipe called for crumbled feta cheese and chopped fresh basil next.  I didn't have the fresh basil, but I did have the crumbled feta cheese with tomato and basil and I hoped that this would give the needed basil flavor.

This is the end result.  What do you think?  It has been my experience that if you like all the ingredients in a recipe that when you mix them together, they should be good.  The unknown here was the spaghetti squash.  We sat down for supper and each tentatively took a very small portion on our plate and..... then we each took a bigger portion.  It was actually pretty good.  The recipe didn't call for salt, but it needed some with those fresh tomatoes.  Every now and then it is fun to try something new and when you have it with a plate of fried chicken, you know that you will not leave the table hungry.