Pasta is a food for all feelings: depressed, happy, sorry, infatuated, tired, exhilarated, funked. The starchy dish can be used for any occasion from celebration to mourning. Even at their worst, those stringy, doughy, slippery morsels can hold fond memories. In law school, I lived on Top Ramen and I can still eat a serving of cheap ramen noodles with much gusto.
Alas, pasta is not raw, so on this new lifestyle, I find myself in withdrawal. (Is it a good omen that the word "withdraw" ends in "raw"?) However, my diligent (and frantic) research has found a few pasta substitutes. I have not tried any yet but, as I do, I will post reports right here.
First, consider kelp noodles, a sea vegetable. All you need do is wash them and then try to consider them a new kind of pasta.Here's what they look like:
Image credit: Bonzai Aphrodite (recipes there, too). Click for another recipe.
The next raw food substitute for pasta is another type of sea vegetable called sea spaghetti. From An Introduction to Sea Spaghetti: Another Healthy Raw Food Snack (The Raw Divas Blog):
Sea spaghetti (Himanthalia elongata) is another seaweed wonder. It grows in the natural seaweed fields of Brittany, and unlike kelp noodles, it actually looks like pasta right out of the water!
Click to read the rest, and for recipes and photos.
Finally, as I mentioned before, you can prepare zucchini—and summer squash, beets,
cukes, or other vegetables—to resemble pasta, and then add the sauce. The easiest way to prepare the vegetable is to use a spiral slicer, or even a vegetable peeler for a more ribbon-like faux pasta.
Image credit for zucchini: HubPages. (As you can see, the recipe at that link is obviously not raw food; the raw zucchini is cooked and we don't do that here, do we?)
As I learn of other non-pasta pastas, I will blog about them. How about you? Can you suggest other pasta subs for the raw food lifestyle? If so, please post them in the comments section.
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