After a LOOOOONG day (work and school), I didn’t get home last night until 10pm. I was hungry, cranky, and ready to completely blow my diet on some junk food – just because I knew it would be fast.

Fighting the temptation of scarfing down a few Cadbury Creme Eggs, I decided to throw together a “pasta” dish (you’ll understand the quotation marks in a second) before I succumbed to diet temptation.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I’m a huge fan of Miracle Noodles. 

Made of yam flour (non-digestible), they have ZERO CALORIES, ZERO CARBS, and ZERO GUILT. They’re a bit expensive, so I visit my local Asian Market and buy the non-branded version, also known as “Yam Shirataki.”

These noodles, which have the consistency of an al dente rice noodle, pick up the flavor of anything you cook them in. Since they’re pure fiber and don’t digest, you feel VERY full after eating them – which definitely helps with overall calorie consumption. I’ve played around with recipes in the past and decided to just wing it last night and see what I came up with. Surprisingly, I concocted a delicious, simple, low-calorie dish that helped me avoid the chocolate cravings on a Monday night!

Ingredients (approximately FOUR servings):

• Two 12 oz bags of Shirataki noodles, drained
• One bag of Steamfresh Garlic Sweet Peas with Mushrooms
• 1/2 cup of red sauce of your choosing (I happen to love Newman’s Own Roasted Garlic tomato sauce)
• 2 tbsp of fat free cream cheese
• 1 tbsp garlic powder
• 1 tbsp of fresh basil (or basil paste, as I use)
• 1 tbsp of dried onions

Super Simple Cooking Instructions:

Empty contents of Shirataki noodles into a colander to drain, then rinse with HOT water for about 30 seconds. I cut them up (the noodles are VERY long) into smaller, easier to manage pieces. Place in a deep sauce pan and cook on HIGH – you need to do this to cook off the excess water and get the desired al dente texture.

While the noodles pan-fry, toss the Steamfresh veggies into the microwave and cook accordingly to package directions. I believe it’s about 5 minutes.

While the peas are cooking, toss your seasonings (garlic powder, basil, onions, etc) into the pan with the noodles and stir vigorously. You should see a lot of excess moisture at the bottom of the pan; the steam is probably intense right about now, so enjoy the facial.

Once the water volume has almost fully cooked off (about 3-4 minutes at the HIGH setting), add your red sauce and cream cheese. It’ll mix with the remaining water, thus fully coating the noodles in a thin, but rich, sauce. Add the Steamfresh veggies to the pan (even if they have a few seconds left in the microwave, you’re fine to pull them out now) and stir into the noodles. The garlic sauce from the vegetables will add to the flavor of the pasta (even more!) and you will notice you don’t need to add any salt to get a lot of flavor out of this dish.

TA-DA!

Seriously, less than six minutes and you have a FULL meal! I didn’t add any protein to it (I’d had a LOT of meat throughout the day), but you can easily add some leftover cooked chicken breast or leftover burger patty to this for a protein punch with no additional cooking time. I almost always have leftover chopped chicken breast in the fridge (I cook about a dozen breasts at a time to guarantee leftovers, actually), so it wouldn’t have been any effort to add some in. At 10pm at night, though, I didn’t want to add any more weight to my dinner than necessary.

This is NOT a Paleo recipe (Paleo would’ve frowned against the cream cheese and peas) but it made my belly happy, was low calorie, and wasn’t the bowl of chocolate I originally was craving when I got home – so I call that a win.

Bon appetit, my friends, and enjoy this simple dinner recipe! 🙂

Tori