"The Great Meat Race" may be a better title for today's post, but that might sound weird.

Moving on, I may have mentioned (hundreds of times) that my husband Mike is a carnivore.  Hardcore carnivore...harcardivore?  Anyway, it's safe to say that every time I've made a vegetarian dish, he has said of it, "This could use meat".  That being the case, I do my best to accommodate his carnivoracious taste, which meant that I intended on adding some ground beef to this week's recipe, courtesy of Pinterest.  Here's how that went:

Text to Mike (he was out playing basketball) letting him know that dinner would be meatless unless he could tell me where the ground beef he assured me we had was.

Fun fact: This is the first time I have ever worked with or eaten spaghetti squash.  I had heard so many great things about it, so I picked some up at the farm.  Plus, winter squash lasts so long in the pantry!

WARNING:

I AM NOT A RESPONSIBLE HUMAN BEING.  DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT DO AS I HAVE DONE IN THESE PICTURES.  I'm sure there's a much safer better way to do this, but I don't know it.  Any suggestions?

Okay, something no one ever mentioned to me how ridiculously hard it is to break into one of these suckers.  It's literally like trying to crack a huge nut.  I'm not going to tell you about all the very irresponsible things I did to split my squash in half.  Remember, Mike was out at basketball.  I was unsupervised.  Never a good thing...

Voicemail to Mike: "Your dinner is in danger of being vegetarian.  Call me back.  Love you."

Success!  Now I just had to scrape out the guts.  When doing this, don't feel like you have to be gentle. You really have to work at it, so show that squash who's boss!  I prefer to do this over a bowl, as some of the fibers tend to fly.

I used the roasted spaghetti squash recipe link on the lasagna recipe page, in case you're wondering/need that.  The recipe says to bake the squash for about an hour; mine went for an hour and a half.

A few more unsuccessful attempts at getting Mike on the phone and a dance party in the kitchen to The Wanted. 

More scraping!  Again, gentleness is not the key here.

Meet the rest of the cast.  Did you notice how many are cheese?  Yeah, anything with this much cheese is destined for greatness.

Mike finally called.

Me: "Hello, my love.  You're too late."

Mike: "I am so sorry I missed your call."

I only did two layers for simplicity's sake--I don't like doing division while cooking.  On half of the squash went in for one layer and the other half for the second.  Easy-peasy!

At this point, Mike was home, and I had to be sneaky.  He has a tendency to psych himself out ahead of time, so, when he asked what the "noodles" were, I told him it was a surprise.  After he tasted it, I asked him for a score of 1 to 10.  It scored an 8!  Then I told him about the "noodles" being squash. :-)

An 8 for a vegetarian dish, much less a dish full of squash by the man that "doesn't like squash", is phenomenal!  I don't know how much better it gets than that.  Admittedly, roasting the squash takes a pretty long time, but you can totally roast and scrape it out one day and refrigerate for a few days until you're ready to use it.  Enjoy!

Okay, so remember last week where I had a plan to try a new dish, but it didn't work out because my girlfriends and I all stuffed ourselves before I could make it?  Great!  We're all up to speed.  This particular little gem came from Pinterest, but the original source is here.

Like the blog entry's author, I tweaked the recipe to my own taste.  Firstly, I used real eggs because I don't mess around with stuff like liquid egg whites.

Okay, yes, I'm sure you're all thinking the same thing: Why aren't the sweet potatoes orange?  I don't know the answer to that.  Some of the things I get from the farm are the same as what I buy in the grocery store.  Apparently this is a legitimate variety, though.

If you look closely, though, you can see some orange-ish streaks.

Wait.  You want me to grate all that by hand?  Haha.  Oh, silly.  I'm far too clever for that.  Shredder blade = my friend.

This dish towel is really big, so don't be fooled.  That's a ton of potatoey goodness right there.

This is, in my opinion, the only way to get rid of the excess water in potatoes, spinach, etc.  Make science work for you!

Okay, here's where I really started to deviate from the recipe.  Like I said, I don't fool with liquid egg whites, so I added five eggs.  It was an educated guess, and it turned out to be correct.  I also added three cloves of minced garlic.  Warning: Because of the lack of sautéing, this will make your potato cakes very garlicky, which I love, but not everyone will.  If you want the garlic taste without the bite, either saute it first or use garlic powder.

I just used a tablespoon to mix and then dole out my cakes, and I used my hands to sort of shape them , but I didn't pack them very tightly.  Just enough to make them hold their shape.  Also, I greased the cooling rack as suggested, but it didn't make a difference.  They still stuck on for dear life.  Next time, parchment paper.

Aw snap!  Look at those babies.  and they're baked, not fried, which is great!  I ended up cooking mine for about 35 minutes.

What can I say?  It's a hash brown, which is awesome!  I bet you could do this same thing with any type of hard, grate-able vegetable: Parsnips, carrots, turnips, beets.  Mmmmm, sounds like a new fall favorite.  Easy, delicious, and not fried.  What more could you want?