After reading Cameron Diaz's book I thought I'd follow her lead in cutting out white food (flour, sugar, potatoes) from my diet and was on the hunt for some quinoa pasta which she recommended. Quinoa is a complete protein having a balanced set of amino acids so it's a great alternative to rice, but even more awesome that they can make pasta out of it!

I went to my local grocery store but there were too many brands to choose from so I thought I should go home and first research which is the best brand. Then just by chance timing, I received Trader Joe's Flyer in the mail! They decided to develop their own quinoa pasta because they felt that other ones on the market didn't taste good and had very little quinoa in it.  Theirs is 20% organic quinoa flour and 80% organic brown rice flour.

This gluten free pasta cooks really fast! I normally know how much time I have to prepare my vegetables while I have pasta in water and while checking in on it was shocked it was already done! It seemed a little squishy to the fork but after I threw on my sauce I didn't notice any difference in taste from regular pasta.

The downside is that TJ's organic brown rice and quinoa fusilli pasta costs 3x more than their regular fusilli ($3 a bag versus $1). In the store I noticed that this pasta came in two colors the light brown you see above and a much darker brown. I emailed TJ's to ask about this variation and they told me some bags are made with tri-color quinoa.

Calorie wise it stacks up the same with their white and whole wheat fusilli pastas (overall calories, fiber and carbs) the only difference was it has 2g less of protein.