Sainsbury’s Noodles, Chips and Pasta Vegetables

If you’ve been following the latest trends in food whereby you substitute noodles for courgetti (courgette noodles), you may be interested to see the range of ready prepared vegetables in Sainsbury’s.

It’s no longer just courgettes or spiralised veggies. Sainsbury’s have come up with ready prepared alternatives to crinkle cut chips, as well as lasagne sheets and rice.

They are a dieters dream!
Using alternative vegetables instead of carb heavy pasta and potatoes is such a fantastic way of saving calories and reducing the amount of carbs in a meal at the same time. It’s also a great way of including more vegetables into your diet.

I’ve been spiralising courgettes for quite a while now and love the fact that I can now eat ‘noodle’ based dishes without the extra carbs and calories found in regular wheat or egg noodles. The same goes for lasagne. I never eat lasagne simply because of the extra calories in the lasagne sheets. Likewise with regular pasta.

Here are some Sainsbury's vegetable alternative to carbs:

Beetroot Rice 

(50 calories per 100g / 75 calories per half pack)

Butternut Squash Noodles

(33 calories per 100g / 50 calories half pack)

Cauliflower Rice 

(32 calories per 100g / 47 calories per half pack)

Broccoli Rice 

(43 calories per 100g / 64 calories half pack)

Butternut Squash Lasagne Sheets 

(39 calories per 100g / 39 calories per quarter pack)

Crinkle Cut Butternut Chips 

(75 calories per 100g / 71 calories per half pack)

Courgette Lasagne Sheets 

(25 calories per quarter pack)

Courgetti / Courgette Noodles 

(20 calories per 100g / 30 calories per half pack)

Sweet Potato Tagliatelle 

(72 calories per 100g / 107 calories per half pack)

While these prepared vegetables are really helpful and a great idea, they don’t have a very long shelf life and can’t be stored in the freezer. So you have to know how soon you are going to cook a certain dish and buy the vegetables as close to the time you need them as possible.

I had a go at making a vegetable lasagne using the Butternut Squash slices. It turned out really well apart from one problem. The middle slices remained crunchy. Doh! This was despite leaving it in the oven for nearly 1 hour. I couldn’t leave it any longer as the top was becoming burnt. Next time I would pre steam the squash to soften it before putting together with the rest of the ingredients.

You can find spiralisers all over the place now. Some are huge and take up lots of space (which I don’t have). But I’m really happy with the little gadget I bought which you use just like a pencil sharpener. It very small and easily fits into a kitchen draw.

Here are a selection of spiralisers available at Amazon if you're thinking about making your own spiralised vegetables.

© Diets and Calories