Out of the ordinary dish #5

For last night's out of the ordinary dish I made a pork tenderloin, sweetened spaghetti squash, & steamed broccoli.  I marinated the pork tenderloin in a mix of garlic cloves, parsley, soy sauce, oil & peach nectar for a few hours, then cooked in the oven for about 40 minutes and it was tender, juicy & tasted really good.  I've never made my own marinade.  Remember, I'm an HEB cook.  So my approach to cooking a pork tenderloin, has been to buy the HEB preseasoned brand, remove the wrapped seal, bake, slice & eat.

The spaghetti squash was the challenge.  It's a vegetable that I've only tasted once (loved it) and I've seen on the Food Network umpteen times.  So I decided to give it a try.  (Note:  Be prepared to be brutal with this gourd - I had no idea.)  After I finally got my knife to impale the skin of this squash, I slammed it on the counter, twice, to break the thing in half.  Q got home in time to pierce both halves with a fork since the skin is shy of being just as hard as a coconut.  Rubbed some butter on the flesh and baked it for 30 min, then filled the cavity with some brown sugar and a little more butter, then baked for an additional 10 min.  Scooping it out was cool.  The flesh comes out like spaghetti noodles.  We added a garlic & onion seasoning and it tasted all right, but was kinda crunchy.  The sweetened flavor was OK.  Q suggested that maybe some spinach and herb seasonings would make it a better dish (leave out the brown sugar).  I agree.  Next time, I'll bake it, scoop out the flesh and toss in a pan with some herbed seasoning and EVOO to soften it up.  I'll attack this gourd again.

I think I'm gonna add a scorecard next week for my family to fill out and share.  For this one, I'd give the tenderloin a 4.5 of 5 (always room for improvement), the squash a 2 (crunchy & need to go easy on the sweet), and the broccoli a 5 (it was steamed, no biggie).  So overall score of 3.8

Looking forward to the weekend.  Corn maze on Saturday.  Benchmark run on Sunday.

Edit: For my WW friends, total points for this meal was 9 with 2 veg servings. :)