Lean and Lovin' it: Delicious pasta swap for homemade Bolognese

I've loved pasta since my first serving of mac and cheese.

My love affair has been on hold for a bit since my path for the past three months has been avoiding sugars and refined carbs and ... well ... macaroni's a refined carb.

Of course, that's not a surprise. Almost 20 years ago Molly O'Neill wrote "Bye-bye, pasta. It's been fun," in The New York Times. As she sadly waved goodbye, she explained that even though a calorie is a calorie, if you are prediabetic (which in 2012 meant 86 million Americans age 20 and older), your body handles refined carbs by efficiently processing them into fat for a future famine. Unfortunately for them and others, we live in a world of abundant cheap-to-purchase refined carbohydrate calories.

O'Neill went on to quote Dr. Louis Aronne, New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center's Comprehensive Weight Control Center director: "People simply do not lose weight if they eat large quantities of pasta or rice."

I'm convinced. Pasta, as well as all refined carbohydrates, should make only rare appearances on my dinner table. Yet for the Lean Wizard, that means it'll be almost impossible to create an entree that gets less than 30-percent calories from fat.

Why?

Over the years, I learned to cut the percentage of calories coming from fat by adding fat free carbohydrates, like brown rice (healthier than white rice) or nourishing whole-wheat pasta, to meals to proportionally drive down the amount of calories from fat.

It would seem a no-brainer to stop using pasta, but then you'd have to forgo your favorite Italian dishes. Or would you?

One pasta replacement you might have heard about is spaghetti squash. After splitting, seeding and baking a spaghetti squash you take a fork and scrap out the interior strands of cooked squash that looks like cooked spaghetti. Not an unreasonable substitute, but just on the edge of satisfactory.

Recently, I saw a recipe that used longish strands of raw, julienne zucchini as the "pasta" bed on which they poured a homemade sauce. Now that's one terrific idea.

I tried it for a homemade Bolognese based on a Giada De Laurentiis recipe that my cousin shared with me last fall and it worked incredibly well. And since you don't have to cook the zucchini first, it's way easier than using spaghetti squash or even pasta for that matter.

So how do zucchini calories and carbs compare to pasta?

A two-cup serving of spaghetti (prepared from four ounces of dry) delivers 442 calories and 86 carbohydrate grams. Two cups of raw, julienne zucchini deliver just 42 calories and 7.7 grams of carbohydrate. What a giant difference!

If you've got zucchini piling up in your fridge, try this easy-to-make sauce over some of it and see what you think.

• Don Mauer welcomes questions, comments and recipe makeover requests. Write him at don@theleanwizard.com.