Yesterday With My Children We Made... Spaghetti Squashotto

I discovered spaghetti squash while living in Upstate New York. I had never seen it before and I got intrigued. The first time I cooked it, I served it with a tomato sauce, just like its name suggested. It is a little bland to my taste so since then, I have come to cook it in different manners: in soup, in a hot tomato sauce, and more recently in a risotto-like preparation. Instead of using Parmesan, I used Ricotta because Ricotta brings a creamy taste to the vegetables. What I like about the spaghetti squash is that I can cook it in the microwave in less than 15 minutes... and that my children (almost) still believe it's spaghetti!
I asked my children to help me out with this recipe.They had a lot of fun carving the squash, getting the seeds out, cutting the mushrooms, and mixing all the ingredients together. I think they had more fun preparing the dish than eating it. Fortunately, the spaghetti-like threads made it easier (just because eating spaghetti is fun). Not their favorite dish so far but an easy recipe to make once in a while. The other advantage is that you can "build up" this recipe so that your family will eat all the vegetables they like. Bon Appétit!

Ingredients
- A small spaghetti squash, halved and seeds off
- 1 small onion, minced
- A few mushrooms, washed, sliced
- Green peas
- 2/3 cup Ricotta Cheese
- Salt, pepper to taste
- Olive Oil

• Add a little bit of water in each half of Spaghetti squash. Cook in the microwave for 15 minutes, until threads start to get off the skin.
  
• Pre-heat oven to 250 F (120C)
  
• In the meantime, over medium-heat, saute the onion in olive oil. 
• Add the mushrooms and cook until mushrooms are cooked
• Carve the squash and put everything in a mixing bowl
• Add the onions and mushrooms
• Add the green peas
• Add the Ricotta
• Add Salt and pepper to taste
• Put in the oven for 15 minutes (until warm)
  

My personal comments:

• I used part-skim Ricotta cheese
• I used frozen peas, which I always have on hand in the freezer
• You could just reheat the mixture in the microwave to save time; I put it in the oven so that my children could see what they had done.