As a personal chef, I am always trying to come up with new ways for my client to eat even healthier. Lately she is on an allergen-free diet, and I am now cooking without gluten, dairy, most nuts, sugar, or meat.

I have run into a problem with this diet, mostly because I am a Jersey girl who has been dating an Italian guy for three years now, so I can’t imagine preparing the menu for the week and not including pasta of some sort.

This is a regular meal at our house and at my client Rose’s: whole wheat pasta, San Marzano tomato sauce, garlic, veggies, chicken, olive oil, and parmesan cheese.

I don’t really like the texture of most gluten free pastas, and can’t use our typical Mezzetta jarred sauce because of the white wine and sugar. So I have had to get crafty!

I bought an organic spaghetti squash for $4, and baked it in an inch of water at 350 degrees for thirty minutes.

Then I made a HUGE mistake and started scraping it out with a fork BEFORE deseeding the squash.

I don’t care who you are or how you feel about vegetables- never forget to scoop the seeds out of a squash before attempting to prepare it. My life was a nightmare for almost thirty five minutes while I HAND PICKED seeds out of Rose’s “spaghetti.”

Still, other than that, preparing the spaghetti squash was pretty easy and scraping the innards out with a fork gives a nice spaghetti texture. I used a lot of garlic and some plain canned organic tomato “sauce” (aka the ingredients just say tomatoes). I threw in cherry tomatoes and some zucchini, and sprinkled pine nuts on top instead of parmesan.

In my chef madness, where I have six different dishes going at once over the course of four hours, I totally forgot to take pictures of the final product. Honestly, this is the first time in weeks I remembered to take pictures of anything while cooking!

I highly recommend you experiment with spaghetti squash, since it’s fun and easy and is even more versatile than butternut or acorn squash.

But please, please remove the seeds first!

-Taylor