Since I cook like I’ve never seen a stove before and I’m lazy, often boxed pastas are a staple at dinner. However, if I take a look at the nutrition facts on the backs of those boxes, I am super appalled by what I am shoving in my family’s mouths! Think about it, Pasta Roni for example (the ‘four cheese and corkscrew pasta’ anyhow) has 34% of your daily sodium per serving, which prepared is around 370 calories! And this is just a single cup of pasta! I can hardly even look at the saturated (bad) fat content – at 24% daily allowance, it seems like feeding the kiddos Doritos for dinner is a better bet!
However, if you are like me, and you still keep these staples in the house, there are ways to make them healthier for both you and your family. Here are the many ways I make boxed pastas healthier in our family, so we can still get fed, I can still cook, and we can all feel better about ourselves at the end of our delicious boxed pasta meal!
The first thing I do is shake the flavor packet to stir up the ingredients, then spoon out a level tablespoon of sauce mix. This is approximately a third of the mix in the packet, which I replace in the package with appropriate dry ingredients for the meal, like garlic powder, parsley, onion powder, dried onion flakes, etc. Most of that fat and sodium comes from the flavor packet anyhow, and nearly 80% of the sodium us people get in a day comes from prepackaged or restaurant foods anyhow (webmd.com). Replace some of the seasoning in the packet with complementary seasons of your own and you knock out a lot of fat and salt straight out of the gates.
If the package says to add a tablespoon of butter, I add a teaspoon. If it’s 2 tablespoons, I only add 1. Sometimes I don’t add any butter at all, and just a tiny dash of olive oil. You don’t have to follow the package for the amount of butter to put in, not by any means. You can skip butter altogether and the pasta will taste the same- trust me. Same goes for milk: if the package says to add 3/4 cup milk, I’ll do a half cup milk then 1/4 cup water, or if it’s a whole cup, I’ll do 2/3 cup milk and do 1/3 cup water (then do the water amount as directed). You don’t need all that milk in there for the meal to taste good.
For pastas that say to add a meat, like hamburger or chicken, I will do one of two things- I will either add no meat at all, or I will add in half the amount of meat called for and then a vegetable to fill in the meal. Broccoli and mushrooms are a terrific favorite for adding into Hamburger Helper meals, and the kids still love it! For instance, add half a pound of hamburger rather than a full pound, then mix in a cup of mushrooms to fill in the meat, or forgo the meat entirely and just do mushrooms to taste. For chicken pastas, mushrooms or broccoli are great instead of chicken, and cheaper, too!
If you have whole wheat pasta around, then use that in the pasta meal instead of the pasta that came in the box. Or, for a nice switchup, do brown rice instead of the pasta the box came with. Often, I have broken spaghetti noodles that are great for boxed pastas, and I will replace some of the pasta noodles with healthier alternatives. The kids don’t notice that the meals have been tweaked a bit, and I can feel like the boxed pastas have more of a home cooked feel to them. Definitely healthier (just adding vegetables and changing nothing else is a plus!) and a lot better for the whole family!
Note: a favorite in our house that nobody has figured out is healthier yet is the Hamburger Helper Chili Macaroni. I don’t add any hamburger or milk or butter at all, I simply make it with all water and the sauce packet (1/3 of the packet is just chili powder and a bit of taco seasoning) and the noodles. The secret to making it taste great (it’s the most requested Hamburger Helper in our house) is this- I add Nalley vegetarian chili to the Hamburger Helper while it’s cooking. Nobody has figured out that the meat isn’t real, and it’s got a lot of protein too! Try it- your kids will love it too!
Sources:
box of Pasta Roni in my cupboard (nutrition facts above)
how I cook boxed pastas to make them healthier in our house