I don’t think many people would argue that the merriment of pasta, oil, bacon, eggs, cracked pepper, and parmesan cheese (aka Pasta Carbonara) makes for comfort food heaven! Unfortunately, these ingredients taken together do come at a calorie cost, and quite a steep one at that! Take the Spaghetti Carbonara at The Cheese Cake Factory for example….it will cost you 2100 calories (2300 calories if you get chicken in it) and a whopping 81g of saturated fat….That is more than a whole days’ worth of calories for many women and the same amount of saturated fat as eating 2/3 cup of butter. Scary stuff, especially for our nutritionists!
But thanks to an issue of Clean Eating Magazine, we tried a lightened up version of this tasty dish that delivers just 376 calories and 3.7g saturated fat per serving. They accomplished this by trimming down on the amount of oil, parmesan cheese and egg used, swapped out the bacon for chicken breast, and then adding in fresh asparagus to bulk up the meal. The result was so delicious it was hard to believe it wasn’t the real thing. In fact, when I served this pasta at Sunday dinner, I had everyone fooled when I announced it was a ‘lightened up’ nutritionist approved version. So thanks to Clean Eating Magazine for reinventing this classic dish to fit anyone’s healthy eating plan. I hope you will enjoy it as much as we did!