La courge spaghetti

Along with a bumper crop of tomatoes in 2013, the other great garden success story this year has to do with squashes, called courges in French. We have about two dozen of them, of three or four varieties: butternut, acorn, one mystery type (they're enormous and dark green), and spaghetti. These are what we call winter squash, and they're good cooked as a vegetable side dish with meats, in soups, or sweetened and baked into cakes or pies.

We cooked a spaghetti squash for lunch yesterday. Big, pale yellow, smooth-skinned, and ovoid, the thing weighed in at 4 lbs. (2.8 kg). We decided to cut it in half and scoop out the seeds before we roasted it in the oven. That was easier said than done, but with a big knife and the two of us working on it, one holding and one stabbing and cutting, we managed it. We'll probably save the seeds and plant them next year, or at least some of them. I've read that they are also good roasted and toasted like pumpkin seeds.

We roasted the squash cut-side-down on parchment paper in a 190ºC / 375ºF oven for about an hour. Maybe that was a little bit too long, because the flesh of the squash was not as spaghetti-like as I thought it would be. However, it had a pleasing texture and was delicious seasoned with olive oil in which I had lightly cooked some fennel seeds, hot red pepper flakes, and a clove of garlic. We ate half the squash, and saved half to have later this week.