Spaghetti Squash with Creamy Avocado Garlic Sauce

As I was roaming around Trader Joe's this week wondering what else I "need" (at TJs I use this term very loosely), I came across a large pile of spaghetti squash selling for under $3 each. In your typical supermarket, squash is usually sold by the pound, usually making it cost more than I want to spend. So, needless to say, I was very excited by this discovery and just had to have one. I figured I'd come up with what I "needed" it for when I got home. And indeed I did.

I love treating spaghetti squash like regular pasta, and often eat it with tomato sauce and cheese. It's delicious, but I was getting tired of it and wanted to try something new. Ari already made a pumpkin sauce for pasta, so that was out of the running. I moved on to one of my favorite naturally creamy fruits - avocado! I have yet to meet someone who doesn't love this stuff. Turns out it goes perfectly with spaghetti squash and it's just as good as its tomato and pumpkin sauce peers.

This recipe is really simple, healthy, and delicious. We had it for dinner tonight, and Ari loved the avocado with the spaghetti squash, calling it the "perfect complement for the squash, much better than tomato sauce." I like my guacamole with some chunks, and so I decided to leave my sauce this way and mash the avocado by hand. Feel free to adapt this recipe and just put all the sauce ingredients in the blender for something much smoother.

I also found the chopped leeks add a nice mild onion-y flavor with a bit of crunch to what is otherwise very mushy, soft recipe. This recipe is very adaptable, so feel free to experiment. One variable I thought of but didn't try this time is roasting tomatoes and leeks or red onions with the squash in the oven for the last 20 minutes, and then chopping them and mixing them in during step 5.

One last thing I love about this recipe is that it is very filling because of the protein and fat in the avocado. Spaghetti squash in general can leave you feeling less than satisfied, but this dish works perfectly well as a main course because of how filling and satisfying it is.

If you try the suggested variation, or any other for that matter, please let us know how it goes in the comments - we'd love to hear about it!

Although it tastes delicious, the green sauce on the squash alone doesn't
look so appetizing, hence why I highly recommend garnishing before serving. 

Apple Cider Pumpkin Doughnuts with Maple Glaze

So, I have a confession: I'm addicted to Pinterest. And since I love to cook, I follow many fellow foodies and constantly see awesome cooking and baking ideas. Recently, many different kinds of homemade doughnuts have filled up my feed and caught my attention (really, are doughnuts the new cake pops?). I couldn't find a recipe that had all the flavors I wanted in a fall doughnut, so I did what I usually end up doing and made up my own recipe inspired by a few of the recipes I found (like this one or this one).

We happen to have delicious apple cider made on a farm from our CSA, and I wanted to make sure to incorporate it into my dough. A lot of the recipes I found for doughnuts seemed to include sweet potatoes, squash, or pumpkin, which sounded amazing so I wanted to include that element in my recipe as well. I also decided to replace most, but not all, of the eggs and oil this recipe would require with applesauce, which usually makes for a nice baking substitute,  is healthier, and would complement the other flavors well. Lastly, I wanted these doughnuts to be baked and not fried, as I try to be pretty health-conscious in my cooking.

I did need to go out and buy doughnut pans, which I was (not so) secretly happy about because I love getting cooking gadgetry at the HomeGoods near our apartment. Any excuse to go there is a good excuse, even though our credit card bill might protest. Normally I try to avoid specialized gadgets that only have one kind of use, but these were cheap and don't take up too much storage space, so I went for it. However, in case you don't have and/or don't want to get doughnut tins, I left the option open to make these as muffins as well, which are also delicious. Actually, this recipe made more batter than you need for a dozen doughnuts, so I ended up making doughnuts and muffins.

These taste as good as they look

Pasta with Pumpkin Sauce

Have you ever wanted a bowl of pasta but were quite tired of the same old tomato or marinara sauce on pasta? Or if you're a little more old school and keep it clean with just garlic and olive oil, haven't you wished you could bring a new, fresh flavor into your bowl of pasta? I felt exactly that way last week, and I wanted a new sauce quickly (in about the time it took the pasta to cook).

I had a can of pumpkin around, and if you've been reading this blog from the beginning you might have gotten the hint that I am a culinary sucker for pumpkin. It's really just so versatile in how you can use it in so many dishes, either as a star or as part of the supporting cast. Faigy and I (if you haven't noticed, my wife and I are co-bloggers now; I lucked out with someone just as (if not more so) culinarily talented and inclined as myself) have been toying with the idea of making pumpkin gnocchi for quite some time now. Unfortunately it was a rather lazy Sunday so that wasn't happening. But we could do the next best thing - have pasta with some sort of pumpkin sauce.

I wanted to really highlight the savory notes of pumpkin this time, which stands in contrast to a lot of other pumpkin recipes I'm a fan of. I decided to use dairy as the platform upon which to build these flavors - first and foremost starting with frying (not just sautéeing) onions in butter. Some milk thins out the thicker canned pumpkin and gives the sauce some creaminess, but what really steps up the flavor is fresh-grated Parmesan cheese. It's sometimes hard to find blocks of Parmesan kosher, so in a pinch the bottled pre-grated Miller's stuff will do, but it's hard to beat the fresh stuff. The cheese brings out some of the nuttiness dormant in the butter and pumpkin, and is enhanced if you add the toasted crushed walnuts.

The last really crucial thing to this recipe is the finishing touch: extra virgin olive oil. Now, I am often one to just skip garnishes and like accoutrements to recipes I see; you are free to do so with the others in this recipe, but I warn you, DO NOT SKIP THIS. The fruitiness of the olive oil adds a really powerful contrasting accent to the savory sauce we've built up and teases out some of the fruitiness the pumpkin is hiding. Since it's raw, definitely use the extra virgin stuff (we just used generic Fairway brand and it was fantastic).

You can in fact make this entire recipe pareve/dairy-free (as indicated) but be aware that if at all possible, you should re-make it in its dairy form another time to compare and contrast.

A fresh autumn take on pasta sauce

Chewy Fruity Breakfast Bars

Some days I have classes really early, so I was looking for the perfect breakfast bar recipe that would be filling and last for a long time in the fridge (so I don't have to start baking weekly before class!). Of course, I also wanted to look forward to eating this thing early in the morning. After some searching around the internet, I didn't find any recipe that seemed just right, so of course I just mashed together a couple of recipes and then took it from there to make up my own. 

I took inspiration from recipes by Alton Brown and another blog I found called One Hundred Eggs. Actually, the baking instructions are almost entirely from the latter, as the method of cooking these bars generally stays the same. It's a pretty flexible recipe in general, so you should feel free to swap some of the dried fruit for other dried fruit you like, or some of the nuts for other kinds of nuts. Just make sure the moisture to dry content ratio stays about the same to get the chewy bar texture we're seeking here.

A single portion of the finished product