If You Only Try One Spaghetti Squash Recipe...

Steve & I did a happy dance when we found out we were getting a spaghetti squash in our Week 15 box (along with another fall tease: apples!). We definitely already had something in mind for it, which brings me to the title of this post: if you only ever try one spaghetti squash recipe, it needs to be this one.

Stupid Easy Paleo Spaghetti Squash & Meatballs on PaleoPot

Of course, that's easy for me to say, because this is really the only thing we've ever made with spaghetti squash. It's not a very informed directive. But this slow cooker dish is both one of our favorite fall meals and seriously the easiest thing to pull together. And then there's the added bonus of the slow cooker, because what's better than being at work and knowing that dinner is going to be ready and waiting for you when you get home?

Okay, so this might not be the most appetizing looking meal out there, but trust me: your taste buds will not know the difference. This is straight-up, low carb comfort food!

Used From Our CSA (Week 15)
spaghetti squash
garlic

Thoughts on the Recipe

• If you work full-time like Steve & I do, this is one of those slow cooker recipes that I used to find terribly inconvenient for a weekday, because it only cooks for 5-6 hours. Pretty unhelpful if you're not going to be around at 1 pm to flip on your crock pot. Enter this $7 dinner-saver: an outlet timer! Pure genius, right? Maybe this is self-evident to everyone but me, but finding this suggestion online some time ago opened up a whole new world of weeknight slow cooker meals to us, since before that we were limited to recipes with an 8+ hour cooking time. It has become such a staple for us that we just store it inside of the clean crock pot, so it's always on hand when we need it.
  
• Pay attention to the funny business regarding the amount of sausage the recipe calls for. The ingredients list calls for 1 lb., but as the instructions admit, you're only going to be able to fit about 1/2 lb. into the pot. No need to run out for a whole pound, if you already have a half-pound on hand in your freezer (speaking from experience, here).  

Even though I clearly swear by this dish, I really hope that we get a few more of these squash in coming CSA weeks, because I am starting to feel an itch to try something different next time around. Here are three dishes, all some variation of stuffed spaghetti squash, that have caught my eye over the past few weeks:

left: Lasagna-Stuffed Spaghetti Squash

top-right: Sausage, Kale, & Spaghetti Squash Boats

bottom-right: Tex-Mex Baked Spaghetti Squash

What about you: do you have a favorite go-to dish for spaghetti squash?

Week 14 Overview

Yikes, where is the summer going? Between a surge in busyness and hosting my sister for a visit last weekend (yay!), I've been ignoring this space for a few weeks. I have some catch up to do, so each CSA week may have to be a one-post "overview" until I get a little more up-to-date. Here's the rundown for Week 14.

Red Cylindra Beets: when Steve picked up our box he thought these were potatoes. They do look pretty different from the other beets we had seen up to this point. And boy was he upset when he realized what they were! He would have swapped them had he known, but alas. Needless to say, they are still sitting in our fridge, having not been used yet.

Yellow Bell Peppers: gone! I ate these both myself throughout the week with some yogurt veggie dip. One of my favorite lunch items these days.

Mixed Cherry Tomatoes: gone! We used the whole pint in a vegetable gratin early in the week. They were such pretty fall-ish colors! By now we've made this recipe so many times (with slight variations) that we could probably do it blindfolded. Such a great way to use up lingering vegetables.

Baby Eggplant: gone! I'll share about how we used these in my Week 15 post, but Steve cooked up something fun with them, a dish of his own invention.

Green Bell Peppers: Steve kept one of these and swapped the others for a bundle of cilantro and an onion-looking vegetable that we believe is a giant shallot. It's gone: got munched with veggie dip. The cilantro was used to make the pico de gallo in Week 13. And what was left of that topped some zucchini & corn pancakes that we also cooked up during this week (we first made them in Week 9).

Red Potatoes: we're still hanging on to these. Though this is a good place to mention that we whipped up some more summer carrot soup during this week (a repeat from Week 10). That recipe uses a whopping one potato.

Red Tomatoes: oh, red tomatoes. Is it fair to say that this summer's amazing heirlooms have ruined plain old red tomatoes for me? Aside from one or two, I'm not sure we used any of these. And I know how egregious it is for me to say this, because tomatoes = summer and there are no less than one million things you can do with them! Sigh. They were starting to go bad (along with some additional ones we got in Week 15), so Steve took them to work yesterday to share with some veggie-loving animals. I guess that's something...?

Watermelon: (oops - I forgot to include it in my box photo!) We're still working through this second watermelon of the year. They take forever to eat, guys! Tonight's dinner plans should help us keep working our way through it with a cool summer salad.

Peaches: delicious, and gone!

Chicken Breast & Wings: we didn't make any chicken this week, so both of these went into the freezer with the rest of our chicken cache.


Even though Week 14 didn't have any new or revolutionary dishes in it, we made it through another CSA week, ate a ton of yummy stuff, and (I think) made pretty decent use of what we had on hand. All of that spells success in my mind. But do check back in for my next overview, because we did get to do some new and fun stuff with some of the great items that Week 15 delivered. It was a good one, and a few of the things we got even hinted at fall's approach, which made me downright giddy!