I accidentally bought a spaghetti squash. I thought it was your old butternut style squash...don’t get on my case. I know in retrospect when I thought about it those are the ones that look like big dongs. It’s not my fault they don’t call them dong squashes so they’re easy to remember. Anyway...no butternut squash means no butternut/corn curry bisque. This made me sad. So I went looking or SOMETHING to do with the spaghetti squash and found this recipe. I’m going to modify it, and I don’t remember where I got it. But I’m going to record it here so I don’t lose it, along with some notes.
0. Prep time. Squash roughly an hour. Everything else, like ten minutes concurrent with the squash for the most part.
1. Cut your squash in half – try to be exact in a King Solomon ruling sort of way because if you don’t, your 45 minutes of cooking time ends up being closer to an hour fifteen to account for the larger half. Honestly, the recipe said 375 for 45 minutes. I think you’re fine at 400/425 for an hour. You won’t overcook it unless you’re trying. If I need to say it, place the squash face down. Flesh down, skin up. If you get it wrong...it probably does not matter too much. Just watch for it to be soft.
2. When the squash is ready…soft, make sure it’s soft. You should be able to poke a fork through the skin or the flip side and it should go through without much resistance.
3. In a large saucepan heat up 1TB of olive oil and 2 TB of butter.
4. Mix in 3 large chopped cloves of garlic and 1 small diced onion. Cook it all up good like you do with onions so you get browned onions, not rubbery white onion in your food.
5. Add 14 oz of coconut milk, 1 TB of curry (I used Penzey’s Now), ½ TB of paprika, and 1 TB of good soy sauce. Good – if you don’t know if your soy sauce is good, go to your local Asian market, buy a dozen kinds, and experiment. This picks up the flavor, so you want it to have flavor.
6. Scoop the squash into the heated mixture. I started to cut it up and then I remembered I could just use a metal spoon to scoop and scrape it out. It should come out in tons of little strings. If you get a few chunks, they’ll fall apart if you mix them around. Heat, BUT DO NOT OVER COOK ONCE THE SQUASH IS IN THE MIX. You don’t want to make it fall apart and turn to mush.
7. Serve
8. Couple of notes. a. Don’t serve it over rice, it washes all the flavor out. b. Do curry to taste. I suspect other curry powders might work nicely. Going to have to try that. c. Peanuts...yum. The squash will have some texture, but if you like some crunch, crumble some peanuts in that bowl. I thought it might actually work to add some corn kernels as an alternative much like the butternut squash bisque I usually make instead d. We were of the opinion it might be excellent with some chicken added, but probably cook that up first so you’re not overcooking the squash. e. I didn’t try it, but some red pepper flakes seemed like a good idea for extra flavor and color. f. The original recipe says optionally add 1-2 TB hot sauce and 3 TB cilantro. We don’t do cilantro around here because someone is allergic (not me!). And it was plenty spicy with the Curry Now powder and paprika. I’d be careful with the hot sauce if you go that route to manage the heat and avoid overriding the rest of the flavors.
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