Pinterest Win: Tomato Basil Spaghetti Squash Bake

Four of my Pinterest boards

For about a year now I’ve been pinning photos of beautiful faraway places I want to visit one day, quotes and recipes to boards set up on my Pinterest page. When I find a recipe that looks good I immediately pin it to my “one day I’ll cook this” board. I have every intention of trying it out at some point but there’s a fear that it won’t turn out well. There are several places devoted to Pinterest “fails” and the outcomes are pretty funny.

Thankfully not everything on Pinterest is a Martha Stewart style perfectly perfected advanced recipe that can never be duplicated. I can attest and happily so. Recently I rolled up my sleeves and tried out a new recipe, Tomato Basil Spaghetti Squash Bake posted on the website Alaska from Scratch.
I really like spaghetti squash and I’ve been looking for new ways to prepare it. When I came across this recipe I thought it was worth trying. It had everything I like: simple, easy to prepare, and healthy. When it comes to deciding whether or not to try cooking a new dish the number of ingredients is also important. If it has more than ten or twelve I’m bowing out. Especially if it calls for a pinch of some random spice that I’ll never use again. Simple and easy is best for me. I don’t have any aspirations of competing on Bravo’s Top Chef.

On Christmas Day I packed up everything I needed for the dish so that I could prepare it at the home of Jeff’s parents. We were spending the day there so it made sense to not cook it in advance. After baking the spaghetti squash first putting it all together was very easy. Within about an hour and a half I placed it on the table alongside a rib roast, broccoli, mushrooms, baked potatoes, and corn bread.

Final product

It was a hit. Yay!

It was tasty and light and the perfect compliment to the roast. *fist pump* I'm looking forward to making it again.

Phew.

Courtesy Alaska from Scratch

I was pretty nervous. Trying a new dish for an audience no less just intensified the pressure I put on myself. I’m no culinary genius but I've mastered a few dishes. My mother is a wonderful cook and baker. I've spent countless hours in the kitchen with her talking while she cooked. Growing up I helped while she baked cakes from scratch. She showed me how to cook a lot of different meals when but when she tried to show me how to cut up a whole chicken I famously (in our family) rejected such a notion hahaha. To this day I still don’t like handling raw meat.

With one new recipe successfully prepared to rave reviews, there’s a couple dozen more to go.

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.”

-Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin