Or would it be straw? I honestly have no knowledge of the color difference between hay and straw. Perhaps a farmer could help me out.
Modifications: The recipe calls for both whole wheat pasta and regular pasta, hence the 'straw and hay' theme. I used Barilla Plus spaghetti, which I find to be a happy medium between the two.
To start out, I put my flour, 1% milk, salt, and fat free cream cheese in the blender and processed until smooth.
(I would show you the photo of the ingredients in the blender, but white sauce + a white blender + a white wall behind it = a very boring picture.)
To finish off the sauce, melt the butter in a sauce pan and sauté the garlic.
Pour in your blender mixture, stirring constantly. My sauce thickened up instantly it seemed, but stirring is still important.
Stir in the parmesan cheese, cover, and take off the heat.
(I have no idea where the strange, crescent-moon shadow came from in these photos. Just go with it.)
Now, if you're like me, this is about where you stop taking pictures. The next step, if you're like me, would have been to bring water for your pasta to a boil, while the asparagus pieces roast in the oven for ten minutes or until tender crisp. Throw in the pasta once that water is a-boilin', and remove your asparagus to a plate...
...but ONLY if you're like me.
Because if you are like me, you have a husband who would completely scoff at this recipe, had he known it was being cooked for him.
Because he's a man.
And because he is the kind of man he is, when he sees a meal like this, the first thing I hear after
"Thank you for dinner, babe"
is...
"...does it have meat?".
No, dearest dear heart, it doesn't. Now pipe down and eat.
However, since he puts up with, and often enables, my new cooking endeavors, I feel it is only right to think of him while cooking dinners like this one.
So, if you're like me, toss your homemade mozzarella sticks/bites/paddles onto the cookie sheet your asparagus just came off of, and throw them in the oven while the pasta finishes cooking.
Healthy? Well, they aren't fried...but mostly, no. Man-pleasin'? Yes. My job is done.
Once everything has been sufficiently cooked, toss the pasta, sauce, and asparagus together. Add in a little bit of EVOO and lots of fresh ground black pepper.
You will have something that looks like this:
Of course, you may or may not garnish your plate with mozzarella bites, but I chose to.
This recipe would have been great...if I liked healthy food.
Follow me here:
I am a-okay with substituting healthier ingredients for their unhealthy counterparts in my normal recipes. To me, they still taste about the same. This recipe started out healthy, no substitutions were needed (except for the EVOO in lieu of truffle oil because, really, who has truffle oil?), but it tasted like healthy food. More - it tasted like what people who don't think they'll like any health foods, imagine healthy food to taste like. If I went for that sort of thing, this recipe would have been great, but I should have known that there is no real way to make alfredo sauce healthy and have it still be the alfredo sauce I know and love.
I ate maybe a half serving of the pasta and went for a slice of the veggie pizza you saw down below.
The asparagus was good though, and very rarely do I get to work with asparagus.
Silver lining and all that...
