Cooking with a New Toy

A while back I was looking at some recipes and learned of a gadget called a "spiralizer".  This caught my attention, it looked fun.  Basically, it was a way to prepare vegetables for salad or other dishes, including making "noodles" of them to replace regular pasta noodles.  Now that sounded interesting to me because there are some pasta dishes I really like but I don't like the calories that go along with regular pasta.  So I made a note and did some additional research.  I looked into recipes that use a spiralizer, to see how much variety was out there.  Also to see what a spiralizer costs and, of the several different designs out there, which one might work best.  Finally, after several months, I bought one.  And a few weeks later, I got it out to use.

We had made regular spaghetti and had lots of left-over sauce so I decided to spiralize a butternut squash to use for the noodles.  I really like butternut squash anyway so I figured it would be a good item to try for the first time.  At the store I found what looked like the perfect squash, long neck and very little bulb, since you really can't run the bulb through the spiralizer.

I also had a recipe for spiralizing a butternut squash into "noodles".  So I started by cutting off the bulb end and peeling the squash,  That turned out to be easier than I expected.

Then I cut what was left into manageable pieces and got ready to go at it.

It took a little playing around, I also ended up finding a YouTube video demonstrating the use of my particular brand of spiralizer to figure out how to put the pieces together and make it work.

Then I got to work.  It really didn't take that long, nor was it all that hard to turn the whole squash into a nice bowl of noodles, ready to go.

Almost looks like a mountain of grated cheese.  And, for that matter, you can grate cheese with my spiralizer.  Or carrots, or zucchini, or cucumbers, or all kinds of other stuff.  But that's a different recipe.

Then it was time to spread the noodles out on a baking sheet, drizzle a little melted butter over them and pop them in the oven for a few minutes to cook.

For each piece of squash I was left with a "coin" of squash that wouldn't go through the spiralizer so I just cooked them, along with the bulb end, and ate it regular.  Yum, yum!

After they came out of the oven the whole lot had cooked down a little bit but now it was ready to go on the table.

Top it off with the spaghetti sauce and it turned out pretty good!  A little different than regular spaghetti but a whole lot less calories.  And still quite yummy.  And filling, as well. We'll have to try this new toy with some other vegetable, too, to see what we can come up with.  I also bought some sweet potatoes at the same time I was buying the butternut squash so they will probably be part of the next experiment.  And you could also spiralize stuff to put on salad, too.  All kinds of possibilities.  I think I like my new toy!