What do you do when they tell you that you have to give up pasta? I mean the pasta made with wheat, the main ingredient of a good number of delicious Italian dishes.

Here’s the alternative: pasta made out of beans, lentils, chickpeas, mung beans, etc.  They look the same as the wheat pasta and sometimes they taste even better. I can’t say whether that’s a psychological effect of the fact that you know you are eating healthier or whether they really do taste better. Fact is: I made my peace with them very fast and so did my family.

At first I only found one brand of legume pasta – Explore – but soon enough they started to pop up like mushrooms after a good rain.  Every health food store has at least one brand, regular grocery stores started to carry them and you can also order them online.

We use this legume pasta to cook all the pasta dishes that we would cook with wheat pasta: pasta bolognese, pesto pasta, macaroni and cheese, pasta salads, lasagna, etc. They come in all shapes: penne, spaghetti, fettuccine, elbow macaroni, fusilli, lasagna, etc.

A great advantage over  wheat pasta – besides the obvious – is that these are all gluten free as well and – at least in my case – they seem to be more filling, so you eat less and it takes longer till hungry again.

The only downside I ever found is that they break up very fast when you mix in the rest of the ingredients, so, especially for a pretty presentation, it’s best to serve the other ingredients as a topping instead of mixing them straight in.

Good luck to All and keep your glucose levels down!