It's a bird, it's a plane -- it's spaghetti squash

With Joe on a gluten-free diet, one would think that our culinary experiences have been severely curtailed. But just because we have given up things like oven-warm bread, double-cheese pizza, Awesome Shrimp Pasta, chocolate cupcakes with chocolate chocolate frosting, and double chocolate frosted donuts, doesn't mean we can't enjoy food. At least that is what we keep telling ourselves.

But this opportunity has opened up new worlds to us, worlds we would never have explored had we not been forced to. These worlds contain ingredients we have never heard of, and which cause us to wonder whether they are actually food, or some mystery substances from outer space spun off by a passing comet. These ingredients have names like "spelt" and "garbanzo bean-fava flour."

A trick of GF eating is to substitute these odd types of food for things you are no longer allowed to have. Instead of pasta, for instance, there is: spaghetti squash.

Now, we have not had any pasta for several months. This explains why I was persuaded to buy a spaghetti squash, wanting desperately to believe that it would indeed resemble spaghetti. In actuality it more closely resembles Bert on Sesame Street, only without the striped shirt.

I knew that it would be difficult to generate much enthusiasm from Joe for the "squash is the new spaghetti" idea. Squash is in his category of suspicious foods, especially one that looks like a Sesame Street character. I therefore attempted to conceal my plans from him.

When he asked, more than once, what we were having for dinner, I was vague. "Something new," I told him, which is code for "You're not going to like it, but I'm making it, and you can't do anything about it, so just forget about it."

Unfortunately, it is difficult to disguise a spaghetti squash. And there is nowhere to hide it, except in the oven, and I learned long ago never to hide anything in the oven. If you do, the oven, being an evil-minded creature, will somehow turn itself on without your knowledge, and soon the object sitting inside it will turn to soot. So the spaghetti squash remained on the kitchen counter.

Joe, being an observant sort of person, spied it sitting there in plain sight and immediately wanted to know what I was making with THAT. As if THAT were a plate of eyeballs rolling around.

I explained that I was going to cook THAT, and with any luck it would at least LOOK like spaghetti -- which it did in the cookbook picture, although they probably used actual spaghetti for the photo -- even if it didn't taste exactly the same.

"You're going to kill Bert?" he said.

I ignored this and put Ber-- the squash in the microwave, then scraped out the insides, which with a great amount of imagination did sort of resemble pasta. I put it all in a casserole, with various ingredients that were more familiar to us, which would hopefully make us forget the squash was in there.

Surprisingly, we liked it, and we almost forgot that it wasn't really spaghetti. Almost.

Maybe sometime we'll be brave enough to try garbanzo bean-fava flour.