Pasta Alternative
I’ve come up with a wonderful pasta alternative. I know pasta is not all bad! In fact it’s good, very good…and that is the problem. I eat way too much of it when my family has spaghetti. I even thought that getting whole grain or multigrain pasta made it better. It has fiber and protein and you know ….justify, justify, justify!
But I made the mistake or rather I had the “insight” to look at the calorie count. Oops, that changes everything…and fast! 200 calories per serving. Okay that doesn’t sound too bad! How much is a serving? Turns out it is 2 ounces. Okay, how much is 2 ounces? I measured it out. 2 ounces is not much! Not much at all! About 1/4 of what an imagined plate of spaghetti looks like–I know imagination is in the eyes of the beholder but imagine photos of spaghetti that you have seen.
So if the average spaghetti eater eats 4x the serving size, that is 800 calories—-before any sauce! Put some sauce on it, add a breadstick or two and that sounds like more calories than I would burn off in any evening before bed (assuming of course that the spaghetti was the evening meal).
But like I said I discovered an alternative– Spaghetti Squash. It’s really good. Cook it up, put some marinara sauce on it and it is delicious. Not quite pasta but at about 25 calories for about as much as you could possibly eat, it is pretty great! I can enjoy spaghetti now with my kids without worrying about the calorie count.
To cook a spaghetti squash just poke some holes in the skin and put it in a 400 degree oven for about an hour. Let it cool slightly, cut it open and you eat the stringy stuff in the middle! It’s just like spaghetti but of course the texture is different. Try it, you may like it. I do. And for 25 calories vs. 800 calories it’s worth developing a taste for if you are diet-conscious at all!
