At Least I Tried!!

Happy Friday, everyone! Today I thought I'd share with you one of my attempts to try new things and branch out as far as what I eat. The cooking itself was a success and I'd definitely recommend that other people try it out. I was a bit under-whelmed by the final product, but maybe I was hoping that the main part of the meal would be something that it wasn't. I bring you...

My Spaghetti Squash Experiment

I had heard some good things about spaghetti squash, especially from other bloggers who liked substituting it for pasta. I thought I would give it a try - if it was relatively easy to make and would count as a vegetable instead of a starch, those were both positive things in my book!

I decided to make the squash with shrimp and a garlic sauce - fairly easy and I figured that even if the squash turned out to taste like a vegetable, then it would pair well with the shrimp. Better than it would have with marinara sauce, anyway, right? So I found a tutorial for cooking spaghetti squash and gave it a go.

The squash after it had been cooked in the oven. The hardest part was honestly cutting the squash in half and taking out the seeds...it was just like carving a pumpkin and I hate carving pumpkins. But once the squash was cooked it was super easy to make the "spaghetti" strands with a fork!  That part was actually kind of fun. 

Shrimp and garlic sauce to go with the spaghetti squash.

The finished product!

So, as you can tell from the photo above, the finished product does look a lot like spaghetti. Unfortunately, I didn't really like it as a straight-up substitute for pasta. I didn't mind the taste of the squash itself, but I think it would be better as a side dish than as a substitute for actual spaghetti. The shrimp dish was good, but I realized pretty quickly that I was forcing myself to eat the squash first because I knew it was the "good" (i.e., healthy) part. I should have enjoyed it because it didn't taste bad, but I just didn't. I think (like a lot of my other food aversions) it was a texture thing. The squash was crunchier than pasta and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, I just didn't care for it in this dish. So the execution of the meal was a success, but I probably won't be making it again. 

At the end of the day, I'm proud of myself for trying it. I had never eaten squash before and while this won't be making regular appearances on my dinner table, it wasn't a complete failure! I'm pretty picky about trying new things but I'm trying to branch out...and I did. 

I am still looking for some good, new healthy recipes to work into my dinner rotations. I grew up in a meat-and-potatoes household, so I'm starting to run out of healthier ideas. Any recipes that you love that I should try?