Celebrating the Oh Well
The spaghetti squash incident and surviving the unexpected
Hiss. The oven is sending out an SOS. I open the door to see the spaghetti squash, which I bake whole, dripping some liquid from its insides onto the bottom of the oven. This has never happened before. I must have overcooked it. Oh well. Lesson learned for future endeavors: always cook the squash in a pan.
I grab some oven mitts and slide the hot cylindrical mass off the rack and onto a plate. I’m going to have a mess to clean up when this oven cools, I think to myself as I shut the door and turn it off. Oh well. I never used the automatic oven cleaning feature so I guess now is the time to learn about that.
This was a day I was doing a lot of cooking and food prep for the upcoming week so I let the squash cool and put the whole thing in a large covered glass bowl to live in the refrigerator until I was ready to “spaghetti the squash.” I slice it in half the long ways, scoop out the seeds and gooey connective threads which go to the compost, and then I use a fork to scrape away at the insides of the squash and voila, spaghetti squash. It really is a magical culinary experience to get spaghetti from a squash.
At mealtime, I warm it up and add sautéed vegetables as a side or my favorite is to use it in place of pasta with a sauce…
