Paleo Spaghetti with Homemade Meat and Veggie Sauce

I was productive yesterday!  It was exactly what I needed to feel like I was "back on track."  phew! 

I ended up going to the Zumba class that I had been wanting to try yesterday evening...it was a lot of fun!  But I have to say, it wasn't nearly as good of a workout as the Body Step class was last week.  I'm glad I went but I'm definitely going to Body Step tonight...I want to get my butt kicked! haha. 

In other news...I made spaghetti and meat sauce!  I've been looking forward to this for some time and I'd say it was a successful venture!  I went off of a couple of recipes and altered them some and was happy with the final product. 

The two recipe's I looked at can be found here:
http://paleodietlifestyle.com/paleo-spaghetti/
http://fastpaleo.com/zucchini-spaghetti-bolognese/

So....to make spaghetti when you eating grains you use spaghetti squash!  I had no idea that this thing even existed until a few months ago and was amazing at how much it looks like spaghetti after it's cooked. 

It looks like this before you cook it:

 

The rest of the ingredients are as follows:

1 pound of ground beef (grass-fed and organic if possible)

1 onion

3-4 carrots

4-5 stalks of celery

spices (thyme, oregano, salt, pepper, crushed red pepper, and anything else you want!)

a whole bunch of mushrooms (I used a whole basket! haha)

1 zuchini

1 can of tomato paste

2 cans of diced of tomatoes

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Step 1: pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees.

Step 2: cut the squash and get it ready for the oven

The first challenge was cutting the squash in half length-wise.  What I ended up doing was microwaving it for a minute and then cutting it in half....that made is so much easier! The directions I read were to bake it with the cut side down but that didn't really get the squash cooking very quickly so I would actually suggest baking it cut side up.   Once it's ready to go in the oven you can start working on your meat sauce.

Step 3: Make your meat sauce!

-First, brown your ground beef until the meat is cooked.  

-Once the meat is cooked take it out of the pot with a slotted spoon and set it aside.

-Then saute your chopped up onions, carrots, mushrooms, celery, and zuchini.  

-Once those start to get cooked up add whatever spices you choose and cook it for just a couple more minutes. (At this point put your squash in the oven!!)

-Then add your 2 cans of tomatoes, and can of tomato paste and mix it all up!

-At this point you can cook it for as little of as long as you choose....I think I ended up cooking it for about 30 additional minutes.  (And about 15 minutes in I did a taste test and added more spices)

Step 4: Let things cook!

-I knew that my squash was down when it started to get a little brown on the edges.  So I took it out of the oven and turned it into spaghetti.  Essentially you take a fork and pierce the squash and pull and it spaghetti starts to appear.  It sounds sort of silly....here is a picture that might make it make a little more sense.

Since the squash was fresh out of the oven it was obviously still warm, so I used a pot holder to help stabilize it and the used my fork with the free hand. 

At this point you are ready to eat!  This made a TON of pasta and a TON of sauce.  Great if you are feeding a family and in my case, I will have lots of leftovers!

Here is what the final product looked like:

delish!

I was happy with how it turned out and hopefully the leftovers will taste as good as it did last night!



That's about it for now but be sure to check-in tomorrow for weigh-in day, here's hoping for the number on the scale to be lower than it was last week! :)