Clean Eating Spaghetti Squash with Lean Turkey Meatballs

                Clean Eating Spaghetti Squash w/
                              Turkey Meatballs

So I found this recipe once again on The Gracious Pantry (if you haven’t visited their page you should!).

I am 100% Italian and I must say…I love my spaghetti! Surprisingly, this was so good and did the trick for me! I feel that sometimes it’s not the actual spaghetti that I love (I said sometimes!) but the whole process of eating it. I love to spin it on my fork and all that jumbo. The spaghetti squash really did the trick in that aspect! Also, if you are a parent who likes to cook with their children this is a really fun and easy meal to make. Although I am 30 years old, I am easily entertained and sometimes act like I am in grade school. That being said, I had so much fun pulling the spaghetti out of the squash and want to make this with my nephew ASAP!

There are two ways to cook the squash the first way is what I did because it takes a shorter amount of time to cook. The two ways are:

Cut the squash in half and bake it in a baking dish with about ½ in of water at the bottom. (some people may not want to do it this way because it is difficult to cut the squash in half)

You can poke holes in a whole, uncut squash with a fork and bake it that way using a baking pan with ½ inch of water in the bottom, but this way will take much longer to bake.

INGREDIENTS:

1 Large Spaghetti Squash

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F

Bake your squash for approximately 1 hour or until it is soft and easily pierced with a fork. Once the squash is baked and soft, pull it out of the oven and allow it to cool until you can touch it without burning yourself. If you haven’t already, cut it in half.

This is the fun part! Using a fork, remove the squash from the shell by scraping it from the top of the sides to the center. This will get you the spaghetti!

Now for the meat-a-balls!

INGREDIENTS:

1 ½ lbs of lean ground turkey

10 cloves of garlic, chopped fine

¼ cup of grated parmesan cheese

½ teaspoon of sea salt

½ teaspoon of ground black pepper

DIRECTIONS:

In a large mixing bowl, combine all ingredients and form into meatballs approximately the size of golfballs maybe a little smaller.

You can place them on a parchment lined cooking sheet (I did not have parchment paper so I lightly greased the bottom of my cooking pan with olive oil).

Bake them at 350 degrees F for approximately 30-45 minutes, or until the meatballs reach a minimum of 165 degrees F.

Remove from the often and allow them to cool.

Overall, this recipe for me was a huge success. It tasted delicious and was really easy and fun to make!