Since the Mr. and I moved into a new place with an extra-large garden last year, we decided to step up our gardening game. This past spring, we added a few new veggies to our repertoire, including some spaghetti squash we picked up on whim. About halfway through the summer, the squash was growing like a superweed, and before we knew it, we had a workbench piled high with spaghetti squash. Yet, being an incredibly lazy and easily intimidated vegan, I continued to ignore the growing mound of Italian squash, instead cooking the more-familiar green and yellow zucchini. Until this weekend.

Feeling confident from our first successful attempt at refinishing (polishing? waxing? sealing? I’m not quite sure what you’d call it.) our concrete floors, I decided to try another first, and cook up an Italian squash for dinner Friday night.

I was a bit flummoxed when I first carved the squash open; silly me, I thought the flesh of the squash should actually have a thin, spaghetti-like shape, um, naturally. Not so! The inside of a spaghetti squash kinda resembles a pumpkin: some fleshy goodness just below the rind, with some seeds and a weird stringy mess in the middle.

Luckily, cooking spaghetti squash is super-easy:

* You can bake it either whole or halved.

* If whole, place it in a roasting pan and pop it in the oven at 375 degrees for an hour. After it’s cooled, slice it in half, length-wise, and scoop out the stringy/seedy innards. Then, scrape the prongs of a fork through the flesh; this will cause it to fall away from the rind, in a stringy, pasta-like formation. Once the rind is scraped clean of the pasghetti/flesh, you’re done! Serve warm: with a little margarine and salt/pepper, with pasta sauce, or with a veggie combo. Google “spaghetti squash recipes” for some ideas.

* Alternately, you can slice the squash in half before cooking, in which case you can scrape out the innards while the squash is room temp. Way easier, right? (Plus, if the squash is home-grown, this will also tell you whether any little buggers wormed their way into your dinner *before* you prepare it!) Then place the squash halves in a cooking pan, rind-side up, and cook at 375 degrees for 45 minutes. When it’s done, scrape the squash flesh, length-wise, with your fork, and it will fall away in the aforementioned spaghetti-like formation.

You may also want to save and roast the seeds, which allegedly taste like (and can be prepared similarly to) pumpkin seeds. My squash only yielded about 30 seeds, not enough to prepare at once, but I’m going to keep saving them up until I have a cookie sheet’s worth. It’s kind of a hassle, separating the seeds from the stringy pulpy mess, but it’s worth a try - especially since pumpkin seeds sell at $4 to $5 a pound!

So, now I feel awfully silly, dancing around all that Italian squash for months, because I was too lazy to try out a new veggie.

Pasghetti food porn after the jump:

Italian squash, ready for a good cooking!

The flesh should be nice and tender when it’s done. Just check out that fleshy goodness - you can practically taste the squash melting in your mouth!

Scraping the squash to make pasghetti.

One squash made two servings, enough for both the Mr. and I.

To top it off, I simmered a tablespoon each of garlic and olive oil in a saucepan, and then added a 26.5 ounce can of pasta sauce and a dozen Nate’s Meatless Meatballs from Elena’s Foods. A tablespoon of garlic is a simple, easy way to flavor up a plain can of red sauce, and the soyballs are a superyummy bonus.

Together, we used up about 2/3 of the sauce and all but a few soyballs, which I made into a quickie soyball sub for lunch the next day.

Yay pasghetti squash!

Which is actually rather tasteless, so you should definitely plan a tasty topping for your Italian squash dish.

Also, if you’re going with sauce, make it on the thick side. The squash “noodles” don’t absorb sauce the way real, carbo noodles do, so much of the excess liquid sinks to the bottom of your spaghetti squash noodle pile and drains away from the veggies. Which you probably don’t want, even if you’re a stoopidhead like moi.

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