Heather Daniel: Run with It

I picked up a spaghetti squash at the supermarket the other day.

You’ll need:

1 medium sized spaghetti squash

2 cloves of garlic

ground turkey

pepper, salt, olive oil or whatever else you feel like adding.

Here’s the squash. Note: Certified Organic Sticker.

There are two schools of thought on cooking spaghetti squash. Either you have to cleave it in two or cook it whole, which takes about twice as long. Not being a patient person, I went for the cleave-in-two method. Except I couldn’t find a cleaver, so I used a dough cutter.

Next, get rid of all the stringy guts. You can save the seeds and use them later on. Poke holes into the skin so that steam may escape.

They go into a large cooking pan, face down. They cook in a pre-heated oven at 375 for about an hour. Many recipes underestimate the time needed. My squash needed a bit more than an hour. You’ll know it’s done when you can stick a knife in easily.

I was planning on having it for dinner. I came home from my run, stuck the squash in the oven and waited and waited and finally got fed up waiting for the squash to cook and settled on yogurt for dinner. So, the cooked squash waited overnight for me to come back to it for lunch.

It’s called spaghetti squash for a reason. Look at it! It’s so fun.

In a skillet, I browned some turkey, added garlic and some fresh rosemary. Then I added the spaghetti squash, drizzled some olive oil and waited for everything to start smelling good.

The culinary result, dusted with a little Parmesan, was a very scrumptious, nutritious lunch. I liked the spaghetti squash because it didn’t have a mushy texture. The strings definitely were somewhat like spaghetti but with a nuttier taste. It would be great with more fixings – steamed veggies, different types of cheese or maybe used as a bed for grilled chicken.