Spaghetti squash....or is it?!?

So today's lunch menu included spaghetti squash.  I've never cooked spaghetti squash before, and I was skeptical of the directions that The New American Plate cookbook gave me.  For one thing, they didn't give any indication of how the cooking time applied to the size of the squash, and Jeffrey and I had bought a really heavy, large one home from the farmer's market in Fort Dodge, Iowa.  We also visited the wonderful Community Apple Orchard while we were there, but that's a post for another day.

Anyway, I wasn't sure that our heavy squash would be at all done in the 15-18 minute time frame NAP allotted, but actually, that seemed not too far off. 

The really hard part was piercing the squash before putting it in the microwave, to give it some steam vents so it wouldn't explode. Spaghetti squash are winter squash, and have a very hard exterior.  Even with super-sharp knives, I was afraid I was going to bend the blade getting it in and out.  After I had it cooking in the microwave, I decided to check out some online advice.  Hmmm....this squash doesn't look like any that are pictured online.  The online ones are yellow, and ours is green-striped.  I wondered if we hadn't picked up a different squash variety, although the vendor did specifically say that this was a spaghetti squash.

As it turns out, I'm not really sure it was spaghetti squash at all!  It did shred up a little bit, but it didn't make long spaghetti strands.  It still tasted great, and we had a really nice lunch with Caesar salad, garlic bread, and the Probably-Not-Spaghetti squash with a wonderful meat spaghetti sauce.  I was way too generous on our plate portions, so we have 3 future lunches now packed up in the refrigerator.