Yes… this is going to turn into a 4 part series!  I can only eat half a squash in one dinner!

So, last night I had half a spaghetti squash to play with, and didn’t want to do the same recipe again.  That would be boring and I am not boring – in the kitchen anyway!

A quick raid of my freezer showed me that I had a little portion of mince to play with, so that came out and got defrosted.  Still no idea what was coming, but I figured it would work.

What ended up happening was a kind of cottage pie type thing, and it was rather nice!

See…

(Yes, I need to work at my photography skills, I know!)

I am not going to post a recipe because quite frankly I’m not sure how much of what went in!  I was on skype to my best friend at the time, and so any measuring or attention paying went clean out the window because gossip is too precious to miss any!

But, this is roughly it:

Mince was dry fried in a pan, and when it was coloured I added some beef stock powder.  I used Ina Paarman‘s.  It has no wheat flour as a thickener, and it’s a beautifully seasoned powder.  I use a lot of her products and haven’t tried one that I haven’t liked yet.  Do yourself a favour and pick one up next time you see it!

I then added in the left-over garlic mushrooms from my last spaghetti squash experiment.  Then a bit of water because I didn’t want it to all get dry.

When the squash was done in the microwave, I scraped it out and added a little grated vintage cheddar.  The best thing about the vintage cheddar is that the flavour is so strong that you don’t have to use as much to get the cheesy goodness in your dish.  This categorically counts as a clean eating point to remember!

One thing here, that I didn’t do because of the aforementioned gossiping… drain the fat/liquid off the meat before putting it into a dish.  Oops.  Anyway, then you pop on the spaghetti squash like you would the mashed potato.

I then put the dish in the oven for 5 mins to see what would happen.  Nothing much is the answer!  Strands of the squash crisped up a little (as evidenced in the pic above), and the cheese melted in.  That works!

Serve and enjoy!