Valentine's Supper

Last Friday was Valentine's Day.  It was also our wedding anniversary.  The good thing about having your anniversary on Valentine's Day is that you will never forget the date.  The bad thing is that all the restaurants are jammed.  We had reservations to go out on Saturday evening.  On Friday I was going to prepare supper in the apartment.

I suppose that it was a bit of a risk to prepare something new for our anniversary, but I had seen spaghetti squash at Walmart.  I had never prepared that before, but I decided to give it a try.  I read some articles on the internet and watched a video on YouTube on how to cook the squash.  First of all, I pricked the squash with a fork and put the entire thing in the microwave for three minutes.  That was to soften it a bit so that it would not be so hard to cut.  I spite of that, it was still difficult.  I sliced off the ends, and instead of splitting it in half lengthwise, I followed the advice of the video and cut it across in three sections.  I did not have a baking dish big enough for the squash, so I put it in my large, oven-proof frying pan.  I put some water in the bottom of the pan, drizzled some olive oil and sprinkled some salt on top of it.  I tented it with aluminum foil and put it into a 200 C (400 F) oven and baked it for forty minutes.

I took it out of the oven to check to see if it was done.  Sure enough, the flesh of the squash separated into spaghetti-like strands with a fork.  I put the "spaghetti" into a baking dish.

Rather than just buy a jar of spaghetti sauce, I wanted to make my own.  This is where I got very experimental.  I had read an article that said that you can use avocado with tomatoes to create a spaghetti sauce, but it did not give a recipe.  I put the flesh of a ripe avocado into the blender and added about a half dozen tomatoes that I roasted on the "comal" (grill) and two peeled and roasted cloves of garlic.  I also added some shredded Parmesan cheese. (I had bought a small triangle of real cheese and shredded it myself.) I pureed that in the blender.  Then I added some sauteed chopped onion and bell pepper to give it some texture.

I ladled the sauce over the spaghetti squash and topped it with the rest of the Parmesan cheese.  I put it back in the oven for just fifteen minutes.

I served the squash with thin slices of "serrano" ham imported from Spain and steamed Brussel sprouts that I had purchased at the outdoor market the day before.

The meal was a success.  The squash was very tasty, and we finished off the entire casserole.