Dark Days Meal #2 (posted Nov. 27)

Only the past couple of months have I started to stretch my food boundaries. Before then I would buy my usual fruits and veggies and eat them raw in a salad or steamed most of the time. I always looked at recipes and I collect cook books, but I was always thrown off by not having one ingredient or another or just being hesitant to try something. Lately I have been trying food I never have before and I've been learning to substitute ingredients, cook on a whim, create meals. It's been fun and I have discovered that me and my daughter ( my son eats 10 things total) like most of what we've tried. Tonight was a great example! 

I didn't get to the FM this weekend and I didn't get my csa box this week because of the holiday, so I had to use what I had in the house. I had plenty of beets (which we tried for the first time last week and loved), a spaghetti squash one of the farmers had thrown in my bag to try, and eggplant I had picked up but kept ignoring every time I opened the fridge. All the recipes for eggplant I had come across seemed to include lots of cheese and breadcrumbs and I don't have local of eithier. Then I saw the recap from last week and I stole Melanzane Al Funghetto from Alison ( Artisanry of Acorn Cottage), but used the original recipe that calls for simply eggplant, evoo and salt. I did substitute avocado oil, because I ran out of evoo this week. To go with that I decided to try the spaghetti squash I've been wanting to cook and was planning on making a beet cream sauce to go with it. I don't have homemade tomato sauce and I had plenty of beets so I dug around on the internet and found a recipe. But....things didn't turn out as planned. I was so busy in the kitchen and with the kids that I forgot to roast the beets ahead of time and they wouldn't have been ready with the rest of my dinner. So I roasted them anyways for a salad tomorrow and instead decided to make a quick tomato sauce myself with fresh tomatoes. That turned out to be my favorite part of the meal, I simply sauteed garlic and onion in coconut oil ( not local), added a big diced up orange tomato, salt and pepper and cooked for about ten minutes. YUM! 
In short...
Spaghetti Squash "Pasta" topped with a fresh orange tomato sauce and Melanzane Al Funghetto on the side (well it actually ended up mixed in). My bread still had ten minutes to finish baking and I couldn't wait, so the meal wasn't perfect but so very good and my daughter liked it too! Washed down with a tall glass of Organic Pastures Milk and a slice of homemade Pumpkin Pie for dessert! Hopefully next week I'll find some meat to try, but if not looks like we'll still eat good! Thanks for the ideas!

Squash, eggplant, garlic, and onions from Sage Mt. Farms

Tomato from the Farmers Market

Avocado Oil from Bella Vado

Coco. Oil not local, Milk from the closest dairy I know of (350 miles), and not local salt.

The pie was made from a local pumpkin roasted in local apple juice and the milk was Organic Pastures, but the rest was basic sugar, spices, flour and butter. 

There's no picture to go with this, because it was too ugly! Thanksgiving morning I broke my pie dish, my hand mixer and my camera, so I had to use my 3 year olds Fisher Price camera! The picture would have been beautiful though, the orange tomato sauce on the yellow spaghetti was gorgeous!