I had been pondering this thing for some time, wondering if it could really be as cool as people said it was. I was finally pushed into action when my cousin Stacey revealed it was her new favorite food. (Strictly speaking, she’s my cousin’s wife, but I’ve never heard of a cousin-in-law, have you?) Stacey doesn’t cook GFCF, but she works really hard to make sure her family eats lean, unprocessed foods, which is probably 75% of this diet when you get right down to it. And boy am I glad I listened to her!

Prep it just the way you would any other kind of squash: cut it in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds. There are several different ways you can cook these things, but it should not surprise you to hear I go for the quick and easy way out, every time. The microwave only has a bad reputation because people put deplorable things inside it and try to pass them off as food. It’s a perfectly legitimate way to cook healthy food too. So put one half of the squash on a plate, with 1/4 cup water poured around the base.

Cover with plastic wrap, and microwave on HIGH for 10 minutes.

Now here comes the magic. Start gently scraping down the length of the squash with a fork, and the whole thing will just fall apart into these strands that look like… spaghetti!

Stand it upright in a bowl while you’re scraping, and you don’t even have to hold it with your other hand. Which is good, because this sucker is hot. If you want, cook your second squash half while you’re doing this, or if you don’t need that much food right now, just wrap it up tightly and stick it in the fridge for up to a week or so.

Keep scraping until the whole thing is hollowed out, then just toss the skin.

At this point it’s as good as cooked pasta, and there are a ton of things you can do with it. For now, we’re going with the most basic: plain old GFCF spaghetti sauce. I’m a fan of all the Classico flavors, I just get whichever one strikes my fancy when I’m at the store. [As always, the brands I use were GFCF at the time of posting, but manufacturers can change their formulas without warning. Always check your labels!]

I use one whole jar with one whole squash, but I find it’s helpful to pour in about half of the sauce first, and stir gently with a fork to really get all the strands separated and coated evenly with sauce.

Also, you can brown about 1/2 lb. of ground beef if your family prefers a meaty sauce.

Okay, here comes the rest of the sauce, like I promised.

And voila! Now listen, you’re not going to fool anyone into believing this is real spaghetti. It’s got this faint little crispness to it that is not quite like soggy wheat pasta. But if you’re already having to force pasta substitutes on your kids, I guarantee you they will not know this one is a vegetable. There is absolutely no squash flavor to explain away; it’s extremely mild. Just tell them it’s a special rice pasta that’s better than all those other mushy rice pastas, or some entirely new pasta that’s made from a unique blend of gluten-free flours and unicorn dust. Either way, they will devour it and beg for more.

Happy Eating!

Spaghetti Squash Marinara

1 spaghetti squash
1 jar Classico red pasta sauce, any flavor
1/2 lb. ground beef

Start with two butternut squashes, about 3 pounds total. If your children see you cooking them, tell them that they’re just “funny-shaped pumpkins.” Kids are dumb, especially if they think they’ll get pie out of the deal. The top stem is the hardest to cut through, so I always start along the side, then rotate it up on its end to get the most leverage.

Scoop out all the seeds and gunk.

Lay two halves on a plate, and cover them in saran wrap. Make sure to get around the bottom too, or else the skin will leave this waxy residue on the plate that is nearly impossible to get off. Cook it in the microwave on high for about 8-9 minutes. You can’t do all four at once, unless you have a gargantuan microwave, and even then, the cooking time would be off. So just get the second one ready and waiting.

Meanwhile, add 1/3 cup sugar to a large mixing bowl, and 1/4 cup almond milk.

Crack in two eggs, and try to ignore the creepy face that’s staring back at you now.

This is my newest discovery at my grocery store: powdered vanilla extract. The key here is that extracts are usually suspended in alcohol, and often these are grain alcohols; i.e. gluten. I don’t know how they magically make it into a powder, but the taste is exactly the same, and you use the same amount of it as you would regular liquid vanilla. I’d already hunted down a liquid extract that was gluten-free, but you know what? This one says it right on the label, and I like to support companies that do that. So I’ve switched. [As always, the brands I use were GFCF at the time of posting, but manufacturers can change formulas without warning. Always check your ingredient lists.]

So on top of the egg mixture, that’s 1 tsp vanilla, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp nutmeg, and 1/4 tsp salt. I don’t know what was up with my camera focus in this shot, but it’s apparently the only one I got of this step, so you’ll have to live with the disappointment.

When your microwave beeps at you, take a look at the squashes. See the brighter yellow circle in the middle there? That’s not cooked all the way through. This one needs another minute or two, at least.

Once they’re an even, dark orange color, scoop out the insides and add them to your mixing bowl. This should take no real arm strength if they’re cooked properly, but they will be extremely hot, so you’ll probably want to use an oven mitt.

Mix everything together thoroughly, making sure it’s nice and smooth. Then scrape it into a 9×9 baking dish sprayed with canola oil.

Now, prepare the crumb topping. That’s 1 Tablespoon of melted Fleischmann’s unsalted margarine (not salted original), 1/2 cup (firmly packed) brown sugar, and 2 Tablespoons of Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-Free All-Purpose Flour blend.

Mix well…

And sprinkle evenly on top.

Pop in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes, just enough to warm everything through and melt the sugar on top a little. And then tell your children that since they were so good today, they can have dessert on their plate right with their meal. Ha ha ha…

Happy Eating!

Butternut Crunch

2 butternut squash (about 2-3 lbs.)
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup almond milk
2 eggs
1 tsp Adam’s Best vanilla
1 tsp McCormick cinnamon
1/4 tsp McCormick nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
1 TBS Fleischmann’s unsalted margarine (not salted original)
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
2 TBS Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose flour blend

I know, everyone’s got a meatloaf recipe, but this one’s tried-and-true. And more importantly, it has a few subtle alterations that make it GFCF.

Start with 1/4 cup crushed Rice Chex cereal. [As always, manufacturers can change formulas without notice. Always check your ingredient lists.]

Crack in one egg.

And add 1/4 cup of… well, liquid. I’m using water here, because I was out of everything else I might normally use. Seriously, everything. Of course I didn’t realize that until I was at this point in cooking, but I had hungry kids and had to make do. I suppose I could hide my shame from you and re-photograph the meatloaf recipe on a night when I didn’t screw it up, but then you might get some notion that things always work smoothly around here. One of the biggest barriers to starting this diet is thinking that everyone else out there is some Baking SuperMom with a spotless 1950s apron, and you are the only one who can’t hack it, but that’s just not true. Anyone can do it, even those of us who can’t remember to go to the grocery store on a timely basis. 

But normally, I get super-sneaky at this point and use pureed vegetables for my liquid. The kids don’t even know they’re eating them. The store has these perfect GFCF veggie purees in little single-serving jars, all ready to go… stocked in the baby aisle. That’s right–I put baby food in my recipes. Check your brands to be sure, but the majority of them contain nothing but the pureed vegetable and water. Butternut squash or sweet potatoes are the easiest to sneak in, but you can even try for something more hardcore like peas if your kids won’t notice the slight color change. Maybe it’s a disciplinary cop-out, but it is so much easier than fighting with them about how many bites of vegetables they’re going to eat tonight.

I also add a Tablespoon of dried minced onion. This stuff is effectively a spice; it doesn’t count as a vegetable at all. See, says right on the label: THIS PRODUCT HAS NO SIGNIFICANT NUTRITIONAL VALUE. That always cracks me up, I have no idea why.

1/2 teaspoon of basil…

1/2 teaspoon of salt…

And 1/4 teaspoon of pepper to round out the spices.

Then two Tablespoons of Heinz ketchup. Technically, ketchup is a pureed fruit, so you could fairly call this a “fruit and vegetable meatloaf,” if you wanted. But then your kids might suspect you were duping them. Better to call it “Meatloaf with No Vegetables In It, No Sirree.”

I love food that retains the shape of its container. I don’t know how old I was before I figured out that cranberry sauce isn’t naturally shaped like a can. Anyway, this is 1 pound of ground beef, shaped like a little plastic-wrapped tube.

Mix well.

And smoosh it into your meatloaf pan. Make sure you spray it with canola oil first, or you’ll be hard at work scrubbing it clean later. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.

The final product isn’t very pretty, but meatloaf never is. The kids are gonna cover it in ketchup anyway, right?

Happy Eating!

Your Basic Meatloaf

1/4 cup crushed Rice Chex
1 egg
1 jar GF baby food (butternut squash)
1 TBS dried minced onion
1/2 tsp basil
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
2 TBS Heinz ketchup
1 lb. ground beef