Spaghetti Supper

I decided I wanted to give spaghetti a try. But after reading label after label, I realized I was going to have to work from scratch.

A lot of my motivation was digging through the big basement freezer and finding some sweet Italian sausages that really needed to be cooked. I thawed and fried them all up and set them aside. They were from Costco, they were pork, but the ingredients were pretty much pork and fennel and other spices - no bread filler. That was a start.

I had already settled on spaghetti squash. I've tried it before and it's ok. It doesn't taste like spaghetti, or have the texture of spaghetti, but at least it slightly resembles spaghetti visually.  I was surprised to find it on the Atkins food lists fairly early on. But each half cup serving only has five grams of carbohydrate - really a bargain. The net carbs are even less, after deducting the fiber. The only problem is it takes at least an hour to prepare in the oven, so not a good weeknight choice. I didn't go to work today, so I had time.

The sauce was the unknown. I read label after label on spaghetti sauces, at Whole Foods and Trader Joes and the Giant. Carb grams for a half cup serving ranged from six to twelve. It seems to be driven by the sugar added.  So I decided to go from scratch. Sauteed garlic and onions in olive oil, added matchstick zucchini to the pan, then a couple of cans of diced tomatoes. Plenty of spices to make it yummy. According to my MasterCook software, that should come out to only three grams of net carbs. How cool is that!

Even cooler is the fact that my kids liked it. As I push vegies on myself, they are starting to pick them up and try them, too. This is a real victory.

So the dinner in total was only twenty grams of carbs. Once the fiber was deducted, my breakfast spinach-egg casserole, steak salad for lunch and spaghetti supper only gave me twenty-one net carbs for the day.  I'll have a club soda and lime apertif and call it a day.