To tell the truth, we really haven't craved pasta at all on our low carb diet. The sauces we used to pour on pasta, we now gladly pour over veggies or chicken.

Still, low carb pastas do exist so to experiment a bit, we gave them a try. The first thing to note is that a single small bag actually has a LOT of servings in it. So you probably want to divvy it up right away into ziplocks of one or two (or more) servings depending on your household. That way when you want to cook pasta you just grab a ziplock and don't have to do any portioning. The serving will LOOK small but when you eat it you'll realize it's rather filling.

Low carb pasta by Atkins is made with deffated soy flour, rice flour, wheat gluten and a few other things. They warn you not to overcook it. We tried it first in a pasta-with-shrimp-and-sauce recipe and were very careful with the cooking times. Even so, the pasta came out on the "pasty" side, sort of crumbling under your tongue. The sauce made up for it, but we'd have been just as happy (or probably happier) having the shrimp and sauce with no pasta.

Try #2. We got several Atkins frozen dinners that included the same pasta. One was a "Darielle Meatballs in red sauce with penne". One small 10oz container (smaller than most normal TV dinners) is actually 2 servings at 7g carbs each. So I had one of these for a 14g total. Despit cooking it in the microwave according to directions, the pasta came out the exact same way - pasty and crumbling while eaten. I picked out the meatballs and sauce and enjoyed those immensely.

The lesson is that it's really not worth it to try to have pasta just to 'keep eating pasta'. Pasta is really nothing more than a way to get sauce or butter into your mouth, it doesn't have much of a taste on its own. So serve your favorite sauces over a variety of vegetables and meats. You will find that you enjoy it just as much - and that it's far tastier than pasta ever was!

500 Low Carb Recipes Buy from Amazon.com

Lisa Shea's Library of Low Carb Books