At a recent trip to Marshall’s, I found a discounted bag of Namaste Foods, Say Cheez pasta meal. Since Namaste meals are easy, I wanted to pick this up if we needed food in a hurry. We always have a green veggie and sausage available in the house, so we made some brussel sprouts and chicken sausages (the gluten-free kind from Trader Joe’s). We made the mac & cheese just like any other version of it. It was so simple!
Okay, so the pasta is really really orange. The oil is like bright orange, and it kind of freaked me out. I know that it’s the spices and the flavoring, but it almost seemed too weird to eat. However, the pasta was really good. It wasn’t spicy, but it wasn’t overly bland either – it was a pretty mild flavor for the orange color! It was flavored great – especially for a non-dairy mac & cheese. The texture was interesting – rice pasta, which bits of hemp seed in it. And you know me, big hemp seed fan (okay, maybe you don’t know it but it’s true).
Ingredients: brown rice pasta (brown rice flour, water), shelled hemp seed, salt, rice milk powder, onion powder, paprika, turmeric, garlic powder, natural non-dairy cheddar flavors, natural non-dairy butter flavor, silicon dioxide (added to prevent caking).
The best thing about Namaste is that it’s free of a lot of common allergens – wheat, gluten, corn, soy, potato, peanuts, tree nuts, dairy, and casein. The facility contains no wheat, gluten, corn, soy, potato, dairy, peanuts or tree nuts – which is their attempt to try to eliminate any chance of cross-contamination. Safe and easy (and dairy-free). Awesome.
I would have liked to see it a bit more flavorful (I like really intense cheesy flavors) and the color freaked me out, but I would definitely make this again.
