Elimination Diet: Brown Rice Pasta Fail

I miss pasta. I gave it up for Lent, and now I can't eat it in the elimination diet, and all I want is a big bowl of spaghetti with Trader Joe's Three Cheese tomato sauce. I had to move a package of fresh tortellini to the freezer when I decided to give up pasta, and now it tempts me every time I open the freezer to grab some frozen fruit for my smoothies.

So you can imagine my delight when I discovered Tinkyada Brown Rice Pasta at Whole Foods. Since I can't have tomatoes, I started dreaming up cool alternatives to tomato sauce, and I landed on a black bean sauce made with chicken stock and a bit of stone ground mustard. I was psyched.

Here's how it turned out:

Delicious, right?

No.

It was terrible. It was like chewing rubber. I don't know if I overcooked or undercooked the pasta, or if it's just normally like that, but the consistency was terrible. If I had wanted to munch on a tire for dinner, I could've just gone out to the parking lot and taken a bite out of one of the huge wheels on my neighbor's Ford Explorer.

On the positive side, the black bean sauce turned out beautifully. It was creamy and hearty without containing any elimination diet no-nos, and the mustard gave it a perfect bite.

I've got a whole half a package of this brown rice pasta left, so I'm going to give it one more chance to redeem itself. I'm not optimistic.