I don't know why I haven't tried whole wheat pasta before now. I know that there is little nutritional value to all our bleached white breads, flours and pastas. Perhaps a) whole wheat pasta costs a lot more for a lot less and b) it just didn't look like it would taste that great.
As for my first concern, I noticed the cost of whole wheat pasta coming down as the price of traditional white pasta rose. Although they aren't on the same plain yet, all of a sudden it didn't seem outrageously out of the budget to have whole wheat pasta. Even more significant, since pasta is a food I stockpile in my food storage, grocery stores have started to include it in the items that go on sale once in a while, making it more budget and food-storage friendly.
Even while having a couple of boxes of whole wheat pasta on my shelf downstairs, my second concern continued to loom. The boxes sat for a couple of months. The first was given to me by a friend who brought a meal over while I was sick with this last pregnancy. Then I reluctantly picked up a couple more when I saw a sale, unable to pass over the deal.
So last week I finally decided that I would give it a whirl.
I LOVE WHOLE WHEAT PASTA!
Really - it tastes infinitely better than its bleached and unhealthy counter part! I was so astonished. I think James got tired of hearing me praise in wonder as I savoured the thick spaghetti noodles under a plain old jar of spaghetti sauce accentuated with chunks of broccoli. Really, looking back, I wasn't even giving it a real chance when I served it with plain sauce and nothing to embellish but the broccoli. But even in these underdog circumstances, it triumphed over my tastebuds.
I don't even want to eat white pasta anymore. (Too bad since the very morning of the whole wheat pasta dinner I had done the food shopping, including stockpiling on another 3 months of white pasta that was on fire sale!) While I still cling to white rice and often prefer white flour, I have certainly leaped whole-heartedly onto the whole wheat pasta train.
4 comments:
I so far prefer whole wheat pasta, have for years. I haven't bought white pasta in I don't know how long.
President's Choice makes a good, relatively inexpensive, whole wheat pasta, by the way.
Yeah we switched to whole wheat pasta about two years ago. Still haven't sold my parents on it yet, so I regularly have white pasta on Friday nights at their place and the taste is so different.
We switch between President's Choice and Healthy Harvest, depending on the sale. Even at regular price it's so worth it. You may get use out of the white pasta yet if you have guests over for an Italian dinner that are resistant. It's happened to me.
Ours was a Healthy Harvest. I had it again tonight. Still the yummiest pasta ever. I'll keep an eye out for President's Choice also. Unfortuately, they don't carry that brand at my usual grocery store, but since everything in Orangeville is only 5 minutes away it's not a huge sacrifice to drop in at one of the other chains!
President's Choice uses, "It's worth switching supermarkets for" as their tag. While I'm not sure I would actually switch supermarkets if I liked mine, I find the tag is fairly accurate. I LOVE President's Choice stuff, sometimes better than the brand name (they make organic baby food for the same price as the non-organic, at a consistency that Shea would eat when he wouldn't eat anything. We will still use it to get some extra veggies into him.
I tend to like the grocery stores that carry PC also (Fortinos, Superstore, No Frills), but I really love the brand.
I taste no difference between Healthy Harvest and PC whole wheat pasta, though (I, too, switch back and forth depending on the sale), but I do like that Healthy Harvest also carried flax and multigrain whole wheat pasta (used the flax a lot while pregnant).
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