Sunday, July 29, 2012

Quite Possibly the Healthiest Spaghetti and Meat Sauce You Could Ever Make

I genuinely believe that the only way to make this any healthier is by removing entire ingredients. And life's too short to skimp like that.

The ingredients are as so:
- One package of corn pasta (aka gluten-free)
- One jar of organic marina sauce
- One pound of organic, grass-fed beef
- One package of chicken sausage
- A smidgen of salt and oregano (not pictured)

As I've mentioned before, I'm trying to reduce my gluten intake. I'm not here to convert people, but I believe that studies that find a link between gluten and weight gain, sluggish behavior, and overeating. While this personal crusade is a lost cause on bread (gluten-free bread is not bread; it is microwaved cardboard shreds), corn pasta has been my saving grace. Rice pasta is very sticky and doesn't keep well (meaning no leftovers), but corn pasta is absolutely amazing. Corn/rice hybrid pasta is pretty good, but that's for another day.

I first set the oven to 425*F and baked the chicken sausage for roughly 30 minutes, or until the skin had browned. After it was fully cooked, I set the sausage aside to cool off while I worked on the spaghetti.

The best part of corn pasta is that it cooks like regular wheat pasta -- and it tastes the same as well. So I was able to go on autopilot and boil my spaghetti for the standard 8 - 10 minutes.

While the pasta was boiling, I cooked the beef in a sauce pan, periodically breaking the beef apart with my spatula. Organic, grass-fed beef has a slightly different texture than the standard grocery store beef, so more attention does have to be made to dicing up the beef with your spatula.

During that cooking process, I cut the chicken sausage into disks. Once the beef was fully cooked, I mixed in the sausage and the marinara sauce, along with a pinch of salt and oregano, and let everything simmer, stirring occasionally. It's not a lot to look at, but the smell was incredible. Add in a pinch of salt, or oregano, or even a little garlic powder for that extra zing.

Once the pasta was drained and rinsed, I added everything together, along with some parmesan cheese and sourdough bread (which I will fully admit made this a little less healthy, but c'mon -- it's sourdough!). This meal is so filling and so delicious. The best part is that there is less guilt about scarfing down carbs at a near hysterical pace.

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