Food: Vegetable Spaghetti Salad Curry

We do pretty well with all sorts of squashes and courgettes in the garden, but I find the spaghetti squash sometimes the most challenging to cook; great texture, zero flavour! Trawling the internet produces dozens of recipes where the vegetable is used as a substitute for its carbohydrate namesake - cook it, shred it and stick a ragu or cheese sauce on it, and for extra excitement pile it back in the shell and bake/grill it - but that just doesn't work for me.  Apart from anything else, we eat a high carbo diet as we are normally pretty active people and carbohydrates are usually cheap!

Over the years I've tried going down the salad route, mixing the cooked shreds with a classic vinaigrette or Thai inspired dressing made from fish sauce, lime juice and sugar, all fine but just not wowing right now.  However, this week, having spent a happy half hour sorting out my shiny new spices bought during our trip back to the UK, I decided to go all spicy and Indian, and make a warm salad, dressed with whole spices tossed in hot oil just long enough to release their aromas.

Task one, get the spaghetti squash cooking.  

Halve it lengthwise, remove the seeds from the middle with a spoon

and, if the oven is on for something else, put the two halves cut side down in a roasting tray with a little water and bake for about thirty minutes.  Cooking time depends not only on the heat of the oven, but also the age of the squash and how long it has spent curing in the sun.  More normally, I'll be cooking on the stove top so steaming the squash is the easiest.  Again, halve the vegetable and then pop it in a steamer for around fifteen to thirty minutes.

While the squash cooks, sort out your other ingredients.  For this recipe I used:

Half and onion, thinly sliced

One clove of garlic, finely sliced, then shredded into thin strips

One fresh red chilli - in this case a serrano - cut into thin strips

A bunch of fresh coriander, roughly chopped

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tsp brown mustard seeds

1 tsp cumin seeds

1 hot dried chilli

5 or 6 dried curry leaves

Juice of half a lemon, ideally not a dried up like the one I was using!

Salt to taste

Once the squash is tender and the shreds start to come away from the skin but are still crunchy, and once the squash halves are cool enough to handle, use a fork to drag the shreds out into a bowl. 

Mix the onion, garlic and fresh chilli into the shredded squash and set aside.  

In a small saucepan or frying pan, heat the oil until almost smoking then add the dried chilli, mustard and cumin seeds.  As soon as the mustard begins to pop - a few seconds - throw in the curry leaves, swirl around once, remove from the heat and tip the lot into the bowl with the spaghetti squash.  Add the lemon juice, coriander and a little salt and mix thoroughly but gently. Taste for seasoning - you may want to add  little more salt or a little more lemon, if the taste is flat.

The dish can be eaten immediately or set aside while you finish preparing the rest of the meal, but it is best eaten freshly made and served at room temperature.  This week we also had a dal, a turnip and mint curry and large homemade naan, giving a nice mix or textures and flavours.  And the homemade beer was pretty epic, too!