Spaghetti Squash Spaghetti

I held a spaghetti squash in my hand at Walmart on Saturday afternoon and I put it back. I have been buying everything I could afford for fifteen years. This was the first time in my life I have ever put a vegetable back because the season was not right.

I want to write about that because it feels like a small thing and is actually, I am realizing as I write it, a kind of milestone. So let me set the scene.

Saturday afternoon, two-thirty. I had finished my morning Sonic shift and biked over to Walmart to do the weekly grocery run by myself, because Mama was working and Cody was sleeping after a Friday-night absence I am not going to write about. I had the list in my notebook. I had thirty-eight dollars in cash. I was working through the produce section in my Sonic polo, and I came around the corner from the bananas to the back wall, and there in a wooden bin under a hand-lettered sign that said Now in Season, were the spaghetti squashes.

I want to be honest. In season is a marketing term in a Walmart produce section. The spaghetti squashes were probably not from Oklahoma; they were probably from California or Mexico, picked who-knows-when, shipped in a refrigerated truck across the country and stocked on the shelves with a sign that promised they were just-arrived and freshly-grown. Most of what Walmart calls in season in the produce section in August is going to be a stretch by the standard of what is actually growing in the fields outside town. So I want to mark that on the page. The Walmart sign is not the same as the calendar.

But the spaghetti squashes were there. They were $1.99 each. They were the size of small footballs, pale yellow, with a hard stem and a ridged shell. I picked one up. I had been reading the recipe for it on my phone all week — Spaghetti Squash Spaghetti, from A Couple Cooks — and I had been planning, all week, that this Saturday would be the Saturday I bought one and made the recipe and finally crossed it off the list.

I held the squash in my hand for about a minute in the produce section. I want to walk you through what happened in my head in that minute, because what happened in my head is the thing I want to write about today.

I thought first about the recipe. The recipe is a roasted spaghetti squash, halved and seeded and roasted at 400 for forty-five minutes, then scraped out into long thin strands that look like spaghetti. The strands get tossed with a quick tomato sauce made from canned tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, basil, and parmesan. The recipe is a riff on classic spaghetti and red sauce, but the squash takes the place of the noodles, and the result is a lighter, slightly sweeter, fall-feeling dinner that is supposed to taste, the recipe said, like the kind of meal you eat the first weekend the air gets cold.

Then I thought about the air outside. The air outside Walmart on Saturday afternoon was ninety-six degrees with humidity. The air on Sunday is going to be ninety-eight. The air at no point in the next four weeks is going to be the kind of air where you want to eat the kind of meal you eat the first weekend the air gets cold.

Then I thought about my notebook, and the For-When-It-Cools-Down pile, and the apple I had bought in July as a placeholder, and the apple crumble waiting in the back of the book, and the white chicken chili waiting next to it, and the autumn pear salad waiting next to that. The pile is now four recipes deep. Four recipes I have copied down and saved for a season that is six weeks away.

And then I thought, very plainly: Kaylee, you have decided to be a seasonal cook. You decided that in May with the pear salad. The decision means putting things back down sometimes. The squash is one of the things you put back down. So I put the squash back. I set it in the bin where I had picked it up. I walked away from the produce section without it. I bought potatoes and carrots and a yellow onion and the regular weekly groceries instead. The receipt at the register was $36.18. I had $1.82 left in cash from the thirty-eight I had walked in with.

I want to write down why this matters to me, because I am still figuring out why it matters, and because writing it is how I figure things out.

For most of my life, the things I have been able to buy at the grocery store have been the things I have been able to buy. The decisions about what to put in the cart have been the decisions of can we afford it and does it stretch. The decisions have been about constraint. About what I cannot have, and the cooking I have done around the absence of it. I have learned to cook around constraint. I am proud of that. I am writing that down because I want it on the record.

But Saturday in the produce section was the first time in my life I have put something back not because I could not afford it but because the season was not right. The squash was in my budget. It was $1.99. I could have bought it. I had the cash. I put it back because August is not the right month for it, because the recipe wants October, because the kitchen at home is still ninety-three degrees at midnight and the windows do not close until November and the meal would not be the meal in August that it will be in October.

That is a different kind of decision. That is a decision about what, not whether. That is the kind of decision that women in the magazines I read in the dentist’s office make, the women who plan their menus around the seasons and shop accordingly and host dinner parties for friends in October because the air finally got cold. I have always understood that those women existed. I have not, until Saturday, understood that I could be one of them. Even if I am fifteen years old in Broken Arrow with $36 in my hand and a Sonic polo on my back, I can still be the kind of woman who picks up a squash in August and puts it back down, because I have decided that fall is when squash gets eaten.

I do not know what to call this exactly. I do not know if it is a kind of agency or a kind of pretension or a kind of hope. I think it might be all three. I think the having of a notebook with a For-When-It-Cools-Down pile in the back of it is the having of a future, because the pile only makes sense if I believe the future is coming, and I think, increasingly, I do believe it.

So the spaghetti squash recipe is in the back of the book, taped onto the page next to the apple crumble, and the squash itself is back in the bin at Walmart for whoever picks it up next. I am writing this on Sunday night. School starts again tomorrow. The Sonic shift is Tuesday. Cody’s second GED class is Tuesday night. The composition book is on the counter, half-full. The recipe pile is four recipes deep. October is six weeks away. I am ready for it.

The recipe is below, the way A Couple Cooks wrote it. Buy the squash when the air outside finally cools. Roast it in October. Make the sauce with canned San Marzanos if your store has them, regular canned tomatoes if it does not. Eat it on a Sunday night with the windows open for the first time in months. Save it for the weather. The weather is the secret ingredient on this one.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 45 minutes | Total Time: 55 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

1 medium spaghetti squash (about 3–4 lbs)
1 lb ground beef
1 jar (24 oz) marinara or tomato-based pasta sauce
1/2 medium yellow onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp Italian seasoning
1 tbsp olive oil or neutral cooking oil
Grated Parmesan or shredded mozzarella, for topping (optional)

Instructions

Roast the squash. Preheat oven to 400°F. Carefully cut the spaghetti squash in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds. Brush the cut sides with oil and place face-down on a baking sheet lined with foil. Roast for 35–40 minutes, until the flesh is tender and pulls apart easily into strands with a fork.
Brown the beef. While the squash roasts, heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the ground beef and diced onion. Cook, breaking the meat up with a spoon, until no pink remains, about 7–8 minutes. Drain excess fat.
Build the sauce. Reduce heat to medium. Add the minced garlic to the skillet and cook 30 seconds until fragrant. Pour in the jar of pasta sauce. Stir in salt, pepper, and Italian seasoning. Simmer on low for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Shred the squash. When the squash is done roasting, flip the halves cut-side up and use a fork to scrape the flesh into spaghetti-like strands. Season lightly with salt.
Assemble and serve. Pile the squash strands into bowls or serve directly in the squash shells. Ladle the meat sauce generously over the top. Add Parmesan or shredded mozzarella if you have it. Serve hot.

Nutrition (per serving)

Spaghetti Squash Spaghetti — A Recipe I Held in My Hand at Walmart and Put Back