Pasta got a pretty bad rap during the anti-carb fad that started in the 1990s. It’s true that eating a pound or half-pound of pasta in one meal is overdoing it. Not to mention, it has little nutritional value.

But it’s also delicious – and cheap. Plus, it’s very easy to use as a base for healthy, nutritious meals. Here are a few ways to do that:

Use whole wheat pasta when appropriate

• Know your pasta noodles. Whole wheat pasta has a much grainier texture than the white semolina flour used for regular pasta noodles. It also tends to be quite chewy.
• It doesn’t work for everything. For example, it’s far too heavy for a light summer tomato sauce or for something like pasta primavera. Your lighter pasta dishes will not, as a rule, go as well with these noodles.
• But it’s good with heavier sauces, the ones that contain a fair amount of cream, milk, butter and/or cheese. For example, try it with a carbonara or an alfredo sauce.

Lighten your dairy-based sauces

• Of course, everything tastes better when it’s made with heavy cream. But you can substitute milk. Whole milk is best, but it’s also possible to make dairy sauces with skim milk.
• As a compromise, I’d recommend reducing cream to just one or two tablespoons, and substituting milk for the rest. You might also try reducing the amount of butter in the recipe by about half.
• Reduce the amount of cheese in a recipe by using a small amount of parmigiano reggiano cheese instead. Not powdered American “parmesan,” but real parmigiano reggiano imported from Italy that you have to shred yourself. It goes beautifully with most Italian-influenced pastas dishes.

Plus, it’s so flavorful that a very small amount goes a very long way. It’s a little pricey, but it should last through several meals. It keeps for weeks in the refrigerator!

(Side note: Save the rind from your parmigiano reggiano in your freezer. When you’re ready to make a vegetable soup, add it to simmer in your stock. It adds great flavors to your soup, and it will be soft and delicious by the time your soup is done.)

Make lighter sauces

• Try more vegetable-based sauces. Skip going to the Alfredo sauce every time, and make a tomato sauce without meat instead. Sautee some fresh veggies in garlic and a bit of extra virgin olive oil for stirring into your pasta. Make a sauce with cooked, pureed eggplant. Or make one with roasted red peppers. Use fresh pesto in your pasta. Since pasta is so versatile, the possibilities are endless.
• Use more extra virgin olive oil and less butter. Olive oil makes a great base for pasta sauces, and it tends to go with lighter sauces than butter/cream. It’s great for linguini with clam sauce, for example. It’s great with any of the veggie-based sauces I mentioned above. It also goes well with ground, toasted nut sauce (Pine nuts are the most traditional. Just toast, grind and stir them into your oil and garlic. Other nuts, like almonds and walnuts, work well too).
• Try legume-based sauces. For example, try taking a cue from hummus. Make a warm sauce with pureed cooked chickpeas, garlic, Tahini and a bit of olive oil. This is wonderful with pureed roasted red peppers mixed in.

Use good cookbooks

• Don’t use cookbooks published by food magazines. They have some wonderful recipes, but they tend to be quite specialized. They don’t do much in the way of teaching you to cook.
• Avoid cookbooks with lots of glossy photos. These tend to be low on content. They include a few fancy recipes, but aren’t great for everyday cooking and practicality. They won’t teach you how to use what you have in your pantry.
• Stick mostly with cookbooks written by home cooks and not professional chefs. There are many exceptions, but cookbooks written by home cooks are usually far, far more accessible to readers than those written by chefs.
• But what to use? Check out cookbooks by food writers Lynne Rossetto-Kasper, Mark Bittman and Marcia Hazan (Of course, they probably wouldn’t approve of substituting for cream with milk.). Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian includes all kinds of variations on the kinds of pasta dishes we’ere recommending that can help you get started. The recipe database provided by Cook’s Illustrated is also quite good.

What are your favorite ways to make healthy pasta?

For a show about weight loss, watch “The Biggest Loser” Tuesdays on Halogen TV.

More Healthy Living in 2012 from HalogenTV.com:

1. Dr. Don Colbert Talks Health & Nutrition
2. Living Well in the New Year
3. 10 Tips to Cut the Sugar for the New Year
4. Bite by Bite: Q&A With Macrobiotic Chef Aine McAteer, Part 1
5. Bite by Bite: Q&A With Macrobiotic Chef Aine McAteer, Part 2
6. Potato Chips and Soda: 9 Things That Can Help You Avoid the Weight Gain