Spaghetti is, to me, a wonder food. Most little kids love it, not to mention adults.
As a college student, even if cash was running low, it always seemed possible to scrape enough money together for some sort of tomato sauce and a box of pasta, and voila, there’s a satisfying meal large enough to share with others.
Then, there’s real spaghetti, made with love and myriad ingredients and carefully tended for hours by someone who learned the recipe from an Italian mother, aunt or grandmother. I shared a house with such a person while I was in graduate school, and just going with her to shop for the fixings was a culinary experience.
I’m not Italian, but what I picked up in those days led me to believe making spaghetti should be an all-day project, with plenty of fresh vegetables and seasonings, and some lovely, warm bread to finish the setting. That’s how I made it for years. Then, we met pre-diabetes.
Still, at one point not too far into this adventure, I had to give it a try. I was willing to make the switch to a whole-wheat pasta, but as I was adding my ingredients and computing my carbohydrates, my heart fell. It wasn’t just the peppers, onions and mushrooms, either.
In the end, I realized a big problem with spaghetti sauce is the tomatoes. Oh, those tomatoes. As one website I checked put it, they’re 95% water and 5% carbohydrates. And, they add up quickly when you’re using both whole tomatoes and tomato sauce or tomato paste.
Even skipping the bread, that meal I put in front of Emerson came in at more than 80 carbohydrates, and it showed in his blood sugar. The number was high enough it convinced me to never do it again. My only spaghetti fix since then came one day when I went shopping with my friend Nancy, and she was kind enough to suggest the Olive Garden for lunch.
However, never is a long time, and the other day I took another stab at making spaghetti. Since Emerson knows it’s one of my favorites, we had spent some time eyeing premade spaghetti sauce one night, and came home with a jar of Trader Giotto’s Recipe #99 Traditional Marinara Sauce from Trader Joe’s, which has only 6 carbs to a serving.
Not content to leave well enough alone, I added a can of mushroom pieces, a little sautéed onion and two portions of Morning Star Farms® vegetarian Crumbles™ with 4 grams of carbs per serving (I am watching my fats, after all).
Served over two portions of whole-wheat noodles, with a lettuce salad and the apple we split after lunch, I found it to be a satisfying meal, even knowing I could have made a tastier sauce. The number of carbs? They were heading toward 60 before the apple.
I made certain that Emerson measured his blood glucose immediately before eating (111) and again a little more than two hours afterwards. The 149 reading wasn’t exactly a triumph, but it did give me hope. Someday next spring when I’m feeling a little sorry for myself and missing spaghetti, we’ll probably try, try, try that one again.
Who knows? I may cut out the mushrooms. Or, I may cut out the Crumbles™. There are many, many spaghetti recipes in the world, and I’m not giving up on finding the best one for us – or a close approximation.