Skinny Italian: Eat It and Enjoy It by Teresa Giudice, Heather Maclean Page A

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    If you’re measuring out dried pasta into the pot and don’t know how much you need, consider the average girl eats about one cup of cooked pasta. You’ll need half that much of the dried pasta, so pour in a half cup. Measure out half of that for kids, and double for big boys like my Joe.
    You can’t pour spaghetti into a cup, so here’s a trick my grandma taught me. Make the OK sign with your first finger and thumb. Now tighten it up so the opening is the size of a nickel. Stick some dried spaghetti in there: that’s how much spaghetti you’ll need for one adult. Make the hole small as a dime, and you’ve got a kids’ portion. Big eater? Give ’em a quarter-sized bunch.
    Specialty Pasta
    I said all pasta, fresh or dried, starts out pretty much the same way, as a soft dough. This is true. However, some companies get a little creative and add extra ingredients to their dough. You might see green pasta that has spinach in it. Tricolor pasta. Red pepper or purple beet pasta. In Venice black pasta stained with squid ink is popular!
    Colored and flavored pastas are fine, if you like the taste of them; just check the ingredients and make sure the manufacturer didn’t add any unwanted extras in there, too. Christmas tree pasta shapes are fun for the holidays, as long as they aren’t green only because of an unnatural dye. Look out for added sugar and things like corn syrup, as well.
    Whole-Wheat Pasta
    The biggest question I get about pasta these days is if I use whole-wheat pasta or not. The answer is: Joe and I tried it, and to be honest, it tasted more like the box it came in than the pasta we were used to.
    That was a few years ago, and I hear that the whole-wheat pastas are getting tastier, but I’m still gonna pass on this one. When you make pasta with a whole-wheat flour instead of the hard durum flour, you’re changing the consistency the Italians perfected for years and years. I don’t need pasta that goes all mushy or won’t hold on to the sauce for me.
    Pasta is supposed to be an almost silent partner in the dish. It’s the vehicle that carries all the rich, fresh ingredients into your mouth. I can’t have a pasta with its own strong flavor competing with my perfect toppings.
    I did a little research—and by that I mean, I looked at two boxes in the grocery store side-by-side—and I discovered something shocking: all that whole-grain, it’s-so-much-healthier-for-you, you’ve-got-to-switch marketing is complete garbage. Whole-wheat or multigrain or filled-with-wood-chips pasta, whatever you want to call it, has hardly any more fiber than the regular stuff. Like 2 to 4 grams more. All that fuss and extra expense and dark brown, muddy pasta for 2 extra grams of fiber? No sir! I can make up that extra fiber by eating a quarter cup of raspberries or half an apple. I’ll stick to my beloved national dish, thank you very much.
    J UICY B ITS FROM Joe
    A lot of people want to know if you should use cold water or hot water from the tap to fill your pot for boiling pasta. Either way, it won’t affect the pasta. Cold water will take longer to come to a boil, but that’s the way we do it.
    I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the inside of a used hot-water heater, but I have, and it’s not nice in there. Hot water from the faucet doesn’t go in my mouth or my family’s mouths. Period.
    Serving Sizes
    One reason Italians can enjoy their pasta every day is because they don’t overindulge. America must have the biggest serving spoons in the world, because we just heap mounds of food on our plates.
    A good-sized, healthy serving of pasta is one cup of cooked pasta. That’s 2 ounces of dried pasta, or 4 ounces when it cooks up. If you want to eat more than that, just plan the rest of your day accordingly. Double up on the spaghetti and cut back on the cheese.
    How Fabulous People Cook Pasta
    What’s the right way to cook pasta? It’s a simple question, yet somehow everyone has a different answer.