spaghetti spaghetti spaghetti spaghetti!

Two farmer’s market impulse purchases that made me dizzy with joy:

 

Fresh pasta! If offered it on a restaurant menu, I almost ALWAYS order fresh pasta; it is definitely, definitely one of my favorite foods (the favorite? Perhaps).

However, this was the first time I had ever made it at home.

My number one fear was overcooking it: as you can see (along with a stellar ingredients list) this stuff was only cooked for 90 seconds. It makes for a frighteningly small margin of error!

My other wonderful beautiful order-on-menus but first-time-making-it-at-home item was SQUASH BLOSSOMS! (posing so prettily by my flowers :D)

My anxiety over overcooking the pasta—multiply that by like 10 on the squash blossoms. Plus, there could be no spontaneous plans postponing this meal once we bought them, because they last maybe a day in the refrigerator.

Aren’t they beautiful?!

I kept it vair simple and just made a sauce out of some of my faaaavorite things:

I sauteed the shallots and garlic in some olive oil. Then I beat up an egg (unpictured) and whisked that with some reserved pasta water. That all got combined with the hot pasta, the squash blossoms (just cut in half), fresh basil, and parmesan cheese.

The ensuing dish looked like a still life!

With extra cheese on top… it tasted like summer and Italy and everything good and happy.

That bowl was more than two servings (for my mama and I) but less than four, so we had the leftovers with a Mark Bittman recipe-ish: tuna tomatoes!

Step 1: Hollow out tomatoes with a spoon and chop up the insides (shown mid-process): 

 

Step two: mix tomato insides with tuna and your seasonings of choice (I just used even more of my chimichurri!)

Step 3: Enjoy!

This wasn’t terribly exciting but man was it photogenic. Tomatoes are so beautiful. Usually stuffed things, despite being delicious, are a hot mess, but this was a beaut, in my opinion.

So the title of this post: spaghtti spaghetti spaghetti spaghetti. You think to yourself, “I mean, thus far there is one rendition of spaghetti”.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut wait! What is this adorable beetle-like creature?!

Let’s take that at another angle, shall we?

Spaghetti squash! The first winter squash of the season for me. I seriously cannot remember the last time I had spaghetti squash- for some reason they never had it at the farmer’s market in MA (do you need a warmer climate to grow it; does anyone know?).

So I like to make spaghetti squash with spaghetti sauce. It is so adorable and tongue in cheek, and I like food with a sense of humor, provided there is nothing funny about the taste.

Being inclined to mix it up in the kitchen, I decided to do a sexy Mexican-influenced tomato sauce. That means I did my usual methodology (sauteed onions and garlic in olive oil, added chopped up tomatoes, and let simmer for awhile) but included the addition of part of a chipotle pepper with its accompanying adobo sauce.

It was delightful!

  

I gave the squash a roasty roasty (cut in half on a greased baking sheet- about an hour at 350 degrees. You know that when it was done I used the same tray to roast the seeds!)

And then onto a plate it went, with the sauce.

I got to spaghetti-fying with my fork!

Sweet squash plus smoky-spicy chipotle is a pretty stellar combination, imo.