Spaghetti Cravings

Going gluten-free usually means giving up a lot of things. Yes, you're giving up gluten, but you're also giving up things people take for granted like dining out, or being able to comfortably and safely eat a home-cooked meal with your friends and family.

Being Italian, my family eats a lot of pasta. Every Sunday, you will find a group of us (ranging from 10-30 on any given Sunday depending on the time of year and event) congregating at my grandparents house. We talk (okay, most of it is yelling), laugh, hug, and especially eat. For the majority of my family, this means pasta and lots of it. It also means breaded chicken. As far as eating goes, we are for the majority your stereotypical American-Italian family.

This is an on-going trial for me with gluten-free. I know how good my grandmother's pasta is. I know how much I miss it. But I also know how much pain I'll be in if I do eat it. This weekend, I was hit by an insatiable craving for spaghetti.

Fortunately, there's this amazing little vegetable called the spaghetti squash which totally rocks my world. It's super easy to prepare (as long as you give it enough time), and even reheats well for packed lunches. If I had more time, I would make my own sauce and go into some diatribe about how the best sauce is Nonna's homemade sauce, but as I don't have the time and I was just packing lunches, I'll let you in on the recipe for my current favorite packed lunch: Spaghetti Squash with Marinara.

Ingredients

One spaghetti squash (I used a pretty small one)
Marinara Sauce (I used about a half a jar)
Stew beef (optional, I added about a 1/3 pound of browned stew beef to the dish while it was baking to add some flavor)


Instructions
Preheat your oven to 350F.

Take one spaghetti squash and pierce the skin in a few places. Pop it in the microwave for a few minutes to soften the skin (it's really hard to cut otherwise). Slice it in half and remove the seeds. Place face down in a baking dish. Put in the oven and let bake for about 45 minutes. (Normally I'd bake it for about an hour, but it will be going back in the oven for this recipe).

Take it out and let it cool for a bit. Once it's cool enough to handle, remove the "spaghetti" by running a fork lengthwise through the squash. I then mixed this with some jarred marinara sauce and added the browned beef chunks and put it in a small casserole dish. Put the whole thing back into the oven for about another half hour.

And that's it. Seriously. I ate part of it for dinner that night and boxed the rest up for two lunches this week. I actually reheated some of it for my lunch today and it's fantastic. It even retains that al dente bite after reheating where pasta doesn't.

Squash Curry Soup

Yesterday was my down day after an amazing event on Saturday (Seriously, getting to give the Cleveland Foodbank the money to help serve 200,000 meals? Pretty incredible!). But as with most Sundays, I have to start thinking about what the week will hold for gluten-free lunches.   Fortunately for me, I have this tendency to pick up ridiculous amounts of winter squash when autumn comes around, so there was no doubt in my mind what I was going to be working with.

Three butternut and one acorn squash were halved, cleaned out, and popped in the oven for baking.  While that was working away, I started scavenging through my cupboards to see what I could find. The results? A can of coconut milk, cinnamon, turmeric, garlic, cayenne, and black pepper.  That certainly sounded like a great addition and I decided to try my hand at a squash curry soup.

In a large soup pot, I combined the spices with some butter and then added the coconut milk and squash (I used one butternut and one acorn for this recipe). After adding some sage, and a half a round of chevre (I can't resist the call of cheese, I can't!), I put my immersion blender to use and it turned the combination into a creamy, rich golden soup. Upon final tasting I added some yellow mustard to try and cut through the richness.

All-in-all this turned out to be a pretty amazing soup. Hearty, flavorful, and full of fall flavor. Definitely looking forward to having this throughout the week!