Psghetti Squash and Chicken Salad

As promised, here are a couple of low/no-carb recipes. The recipes in this post come from Allrecipes, my most favorite recipe site. Not only can you look up recipes (what I did for the chicken salad), you can search for recipes containing certain ingredients (which is what I did with the spaghetti squash). I HIGHLY recommend that you check this site out. To make this even better, users like you and me are able to upload recipes, and every recipe has numerous user reviews which is great because folks recommend changes they've made and what they liked best and worst about the recipes, so by the time you make it it's almost foolproof.

--> Clicking on the names of the recipes will link you to the actual recipe on Allrecipes.
Can you handle it? Can you handle all this yummy goodness?! :-D

BAKED SPAGHETTI SQUASH WITH BEEF AND VEGGIES

that's spaghetti squash in the bowl. Not shown here are the cooked ground beef, onions and green pepper. Every ingredient is fresh aside from the dried herbs and spices and cheese.

I sauteed a diced green pepper, half an onion and garlic in olive oil.

Then I mixed everything together (herbs and spices, onion, green pepper, beef, diced tomatoes and cheese), transferred to a greased baking dish for 20 minutes and Voila! A pasta-free Italian casserole!

It doesn't look very appetizing in the picture, but a young friend of the family devoured his share. One thing I'd recommend from the original recipe is to double the seasonings for more flavor; the current measurements make it a bit bland. On the other hand, I was able to enjoy the full flavor of the veggies since there wasn't a sauce or tons of seasonings to cover them up.

THE BEST CHICKEN SALAD EVER!!

I had never made chicken salad at home but instead always purchased it from the deli of local grocery stores. Love that deli chicken salad. But one night I decided I'd try it myself, so off to Allrecipes I went and found a recipe that 161 users had given 5 out of 5 stars and nearly 13,000 people had saved to their Allrecipes recipe boxes. The key to this is the use of dried onion. The recipe calls for minced onion but I use onion powder. Wowee is all I can say!

We mixed the seasonings with the mayo in this bowl, then added cubed chicken that I had boiled while working on another dish. I cooked up some turkey bacon, and threw that in too.  I didn't have water chestnuts or celery, but it didn't matter. Since this was intended for low-carb, we just ate it like a side-dish. It could also work in lettuce wraps.

So this was dinner. Might seem sort of odd, but what I'm finding is that there are no rules, especially when removing a key item from traditional American meals (the starch). The hands-down winner was the chicken salad, everyone agreed, but we all really enjoyed the casserole too.

Give these a try and let me know what you think! :-)