Home made tomato sauce with spaghetti squash

Growing up in an Italian family makes spaghetti with meat sauce seem like a requirement for a fulfilling life. But, it has increasingly come to my attention that maybe eating a giant bowl of starch covered in meat is not exactly the healthiest of things to do regularly. So, I switched to whole wheat noodles a long time ago, and now noodles made with white flour taste super decadent. But after my squash extravaganza earlier in the blog, I became really intrigued by the prospect of subbing spaghetti squash for noodles. Here are the methods and results.

I cooked the squash much in the same way that I did it for "attack of the gourds". A couple of butternut squashes, an acorn squash, and a red kuri squash came along for the ride that were used for soup and squash bread later.

I made the sauce in a fairly typical way for me, derived from how my mom/grandma make tomato sauce.

Materials:
- 1 large onion, finely chopped
- as many garlic cloves as you can handle, chopped
- 2 tbs olive oil (i don't measure, i pour, so this is likely less than i use
- 2-3 sweet peppers (usually bell peppers) chopped
- 1 lb ground lamb from the Magle family farm (beef, ground turkey, veal also work, and with heartier noodles, i usually use 0.5 lb for this amount of sauce)
- 1 32 oz can crushed or diced tomatoes, depending on how chunky you want it.
- 1 4 oz can tomato paste
- 4 oz water
- salt and oregano to taste

Sautee chopped veggies until they start to get soft. Throw in the meat and brown it. I usually forget to thaw ahead of time, so I put it in frozen and scrape off parts from the meat block as they cook. After the meat is browned, add the tomatoes and the water, bring to a boil and let simmer over low heat for at least half an hour. The longer the better. Really low heat for hours makes it taste awesome :) BUT WHO HAS TIME FOR THAT?! Season with salt and oregano to taste.

Abobe is the sauce. You can probably also tell that I harvested the squash seeds and roasted them from the background. Scrape out squash guts after they are cool enough to touch, cover in sauce and cheese and enjoy.

The texture is very much like eating spaghetti noodles. I found it very satisfying. Major drawbacks: it takes a really long time to make the squash compared to boiling noodles and you don't get much out of one spaghetti squash. But after we ran out of squash, I ate it on top of some italian bread that i managed to find at the store that was unprocessed. WOOO!!! Side note: I agree with Sarah about enriched flour in breads. Extra vitamins are important, and enriched flour is the only way some people get enough folic acid and the like. I do however draw the line at HFCS.