It’s what’s for dinner tonight!  What a pleasant tasting surprise, this creation!  Just throwing a few things together…..Who’da thunk it would have come out so good?  Just a few leftovers and some homemade low-carb mushroom soup and Cheddar cheese. BAM!  A delightful creamy seafood dinner!  And so nutritious, too!  You really NEED to try this one if you’re a seafood fan!  This recipe is suitable for all phases of Atkins.

If you look closely, you may notice some grains of rice.  I had about 1/2 cup cooked wild rice in my freezer and I threw that in, too.  You could omit that for lower carbs, but it sure added a nice nutty taste to the dish.  Lower-carb hemp hearts would be a better choice for that nutty flavor when I make this next time.

This recipe is suitable once you get to Phase 2 of Atkins.   Suitable for Induction without the wild rice addition.  Paleo-Primal followers will also need to make dairy modifications to enjoy this.

INGREDIENTS:

4 T. unsalted butter

½ c. green bell pepper, chopped

3/4 c. celery chopped

2 oz. onion, chopped

1½ c. small Japanese eggplant, sliced  (the purple kind, although the black can be diced and used instead.)

1½ c. cooked spaghetti squash threads (the threads of one half a 6″-7″ squash)

6 oz. cooked crawfish tail meat

4 green onions, chopped

1/8 tsp. salt (omit if you used salted butter above)

1/4 tsp. my Seafood Spice Blend

½ batch (store the rest for another casserole) Jennifer Eloff’s low-carb Condensed Cream of Mushroom Soup

¼ c. heavy cream

½ c. cooked wild rice (omit for Atkins Phase 1 Induction)

1 c. shredded Cheddar cheese

DIRECTIONS:  Preheat oven to 350º.  Melt butter over high heat in large non-stick pan.  Add the celery, onion and bell pepper.  Saute until nearly tender.  Add the eggplant and saute until half cooked. Stir in the spaghetti squash threads, crawfish and green onion.  Cook a couple minutes only.

Add the salt and spice mix.  Stir in the soup, cream, wild rice (if using) and finally the cheese.  Scoop into a greased baking dish or back into the spaghetti squash shells if you want to.  Bake at 350º for 30 minutes and serve with a nice salad.

NUTRITIONAL INFO:  Although all diners won’t have theirs served up in a squash shell, this recipe makes six 1-cup servings of filling. I put 1 cup in each shell half. Each serving, in or not in a squash shell, contains:

298 cals, 23.8 g  fat, 8.22 g  NET CARBS, 11.1 g  protein, 525 mg sodium