There’s something about cilantro that can make a gray day sunny and a sunny day even better.
It’s such a vivid shade of green and it’s flavor is just as bright and cheery.
And recently my friend Michelle contributed some Q and As for the blog. One of the questions she asked was if I had any recipe suggestions for spaghetti squash that did not involve making it pasta-like.
And maybe you’ll say that pesto still makes it pasta like. Well, sure. Kinda. But usually cooks are roasting spaghetti squash into tender little pasta-like noodles and topping it all with normal tomato sauce.
Cilantro pesto is far from normal.
This pesto can be traced to Simmzy’s in Long Beach on 2nd Street. It was there, along with a delicious craft beer, that I had cilantro pesto over roasted cauliflower. I wondered – could this zingy herb also transform spaghetti squash? I’ll cut to the answer: yes.
The pesto was so bright and full of flavor that it transformed the white, generally bland vegetable.
Now that pesto used almonds as the nut part (the traditional way basil pestos are made in Italy). Here, I used pepitas (the seed part of pumpkin seeds) and cotija cheese.
I served up my pesto over roasted spaghetti squash with black beans (cooked with cumin, brown sugar, salt and pepper and then mashed).
