cooking tomatoes is overrated (at my house, anyway)

Today I learned how to make spaghetti sauce from scratch (and I mean no cans scratch).

What you do is have some cooked butternut squash lying around in the freezer waiting to be made into pumpkin pie. Thaw it, blend it until smooth, add spaghetti seasonings (onion powder, garlic powder, "Italian herbs," salt, pepper, olive oil), and then add vinegar and lime juice until it tastes right. It took me 15 minutes. If I'd started with a whole butternut squash, it would have taken an hour, but I'd have been sitting on the couch while chunks of it boiled on the stove for half an hour. Your sauce ends up orange instead of red, but if you can't find a tolerable jarred spaghetti sauce and have no interest in scalding tomatoes, you're all set.

I was using butternut squash because I had some from when they were really cheap in the fall, but I'd be surprised if you couldn't do the very same thing with summer squash. It'd just be kind of greenish, I guess. (So no one else on the planet will eat it -- more for the rest of us.)