This Pasta Alternative Has 60 Calories A Bag, Is Available On Amazon, And It’s Actually … Quite Delicious
This Pasta Alternative Has 60 Calories A Bag, Is Available On Amazon, And It’s Actually … Quite Delicious
WHAT: Palmini Hearts Of Palm Pasta
WHY: We aren’t huge fans of pasta “alts” to be perfectly honest. We wrote a whole diatribe about the grotesquerie of the worst offender HERE.
We usually just eat, ya know, the actual pasta.
But we’ve recently been writing more about the reality of calories as we soar gently into perimenopause, because friends, knowledge is power. And we sort of had no idea that with every average-sized bowl of pasta we have at dinner we’re typically consuming 400 cals of processed, useless, NON-complex carbohydrates—which often meant that by 9pm we were starving again.
And so we ate a bunch of crap.
And even though we exercised and “ate healthy” we just couldn’t get out of the weight gain cycle.
And so part of our food knowledge “journey” (sorry) was figuring out exactly where and how we wanted to spend our calories each day to keep us full, and therefore, not consume an entire sleeve of Ritz crackers before bed each night.
And pasta? Is a really poor place to spend those calories, because it just doesn’t keep us full. So how do we enjoy a beautiful pasta dinner? We aren’t doing watery zoodles, protein pastas are a scam, and chickpea pasta is gross.
Enter:
Palmini!
We know that just felt alarmingly like an infomercial but we are not being paid to talk about this—you just have to hear us out on this because we are HOOKED.
We stumbled upon a hearts of palm pasta at Trader Joe’s on our non-disgusting pasta-alt quest a few weeks ago, and alas, it was disgusting. But it did set us off on a hearts of palm adventure, because its semi-crunchy texture seemed genius to mimic that pasta ALLA DANTAY bite (love is blind reference which will be obsolete in two weeks but for now we’re leaving it in).
And so, we tried a few more ghastly versions, until discovering our beloved Palmini, available on Amazon, and in so many shapes (though angel hair has our heart), and which we now buy in bulk for fear of it ever becoming unavailable.
So, what is hearts of palm? It’s from the core of a palm tree, it’s soft, mild, and it’s bursting with fiber, potassium, iron, and Vitamin C. And Palmini specifically is vegan, gluten-free, has only 60 calories per bag, and is non GMO.
One of our favorite ways to prepare it is with blended cottage cheese (amazing when blitzed with salt, garlic, and some milk) along with wilted spinach, blistered cherry tomatoes, and shrimp. This meal takes, oh, 12 minutes?
Another gloriously easy weeknight meal is doing a quick bolognese of ground turkey, chopped carrots, onions, and mushrooms, throwing in this unbelievably low calorie but delicious sauce and ladling that mixture generously over linguine Palmini.
And the best part?
It’s already cooked. You just pour it into a colander and drain the water out. That’s it.
Now, does it give you the precise mouthfeel of pasta? No. Nothing ever will. Except pasta.
But is it very, very good and very, very satisfying when deftly paired with various delicious sauces? Yes, it sure is.
We don’t usually write about this kind of stuff, but this was so exciting we just had to tell you.
Price: $25
At The Candidly, we try a lot of stuff so you don’t have to. We only recommend things we truly love, and that we think you’ll love, too. All products are chosen independently by our creative team, and all details reflect the price and availability of products at the time of publication. If you buy something we link to, The Candidly may earn a commission.
We have to eat.
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