Healthy Pasta: The Sexy, Skinny, and Smart Way to Eat Your Favorite Food

Presenting one hundred pasta recipes in Healthy Pasta, this book give you no shortage of recipes to your liking and within your budget. Most of the ingredients are readily available in any grocery store, but not so with the pasta choices. You will be scratching your head for some ingredients (ricotta salata for grating, Sicilian oregano on the stalk). A good Italian grocery store is a must to find many of pasta shapes, such as bucatini, cavatappi, or mezze rigatoni, and authors J. Bastianich and Tanya Bastianich Manuali give no substitutes. The recipes are good, and nicely laid out on single pages, but few of them are original or out of the ordinary. The pasta recipes are mostly boiler-plate recipes using different pasta shapes and a variety of vegetables and/or toppings. Many of these you will also find in any good cookbook. And many are old standards (vegetable lasagna, Niçoise salad, spaghetti with marinara sauce or with garlic and olive oil). The authors emphasize diet: low in fat, calories, and salt. Each serving has less than five hundred calories, though you could still reduce that since portions are restaurant-sized. The professional photo illustrations are nice. The cross-referenced index is excellent.