… And 209 hours after I started the Whole30, I had a slice of sausage mushroom pizza from Pagliacci. I wish I could say it was the best tasting pizza ever, but it was a little too hot and eaten too quickly to be enjoyed. The next day I had 2 Manny’s Pale Ales and a dinner of breads hummus, nachos, and you get the gist. But this post isn’t about my downfall. That’s the next one. This one is about the highs before the lows. It’s about winter squash.

Last week the kid and I ventured out to the U-District Farmers Market and came home with squash. One spaghetti, one acorn and one pumpkin, at least I think it was a pumpkin. The pumpkin was something the kid wanted, but didn’t want to eat, and which I found in her room getting mushy and threw out.

The acorn I used to make 4 Ingredient Acorn Squash Candy as a side to this chicken dinner from last Sunday. For the chicken I decided to try to “roast” in the slow cooker (just Bing “slow cooker roast chicken” and you will run into a handful of recipes). Probably won’t do that again, but it was handy because it left the oven free for squash experiments.

The experiment being the acorn squash. I don’t think I like acorn squash. Maybe a lot of butter and sugar make it taste better, but the bacon I added didn’t do the trick (and Paleomg repeatedly said it would taste like candy. It did not.)

This is the plating of the slow-cooker roasted chicken, squash and green beans. The chicken could have used a little more flavoring, or some basting throughout. But uncovering to baste defeats the “let it be” philosophy of the slow cooker, and requires you to add more time in the cooker, which I didn’t have.
The spaghetti squash was used for lunch, and was the best tasting of the different things I made that day. And was easy peasy. Squash + marinara sauce + leftover chicken breast = lunch for a week.

Spaghetti squash, for anyone that doesn’t know, doesn’t taste like spaghetti. It tastes like squash. You know what tastes like spaghetti? Spaghetti does. So keep this in mind when you make yourself this plate and you’ll do just fine.

So. Whole30 is more or less over, though my kitchen is full of paleo ingredients, and there are still more paleo recipes to come on the blog. And a few kinda sorta paleo recipes as well.