No-Prep Pasta: Using Your Noodle - healthiest pasta mixes

Once upon a time, pasta-in-a-box meant only one thing: Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. Today, you can find Porcini Mushroom Pesto with Fusilli, Country French Beans with Gemelli, and Radiatore with Sun Dried Tomato & Basil Sauce.

Here's our guide to spotting the healthiest pasta mixes. The best make a quick, delicious one-cup side dish. But despite what some labels promise, don't expect to find dinner for two--or even for one--in these five-to-seven-ounce packages. To make it a meal, you've got to add vegetables plus beans, chicken, or some other protein.

1. Choose cheesy pastas with care. Pasta is virtually fat-free. But some mixes do their best to make your arteries look like penne stuffed with cheesy glop.

A one-cup serving of Kraft Deluxe Macaroni & Cheese supplies about ten grams of fat, five or six of them saturated. The Velveeta Shells (or Rotini or Radiatore) & Cheese reaches 13 to 15 grams of fat, eight to ten of them saturated. Spend half a day's sat fat on Velveeta? No way!

Each cup of our Best Bites had no more than two grams of saturated fat ... and only one gram if they contained partially hydrogenated oil (which means artery-clogging trans fat). That's plenty for a side dish.

2. Hold the butter & margarine. Many packages tell you to add up to two tablespoons of butter or margarine. Bad idea. That much butter typically translates into five grams of saturated fat--a quarter of a day's worth--in each cup of pasta. You might as well eat four strips of bacon or drink a glass of whole milk. Stick margarine, with its cholesterol-raising trans fat, is about as bad.

To their credit, many packages give "Reduced-Fat Recipes" that cut back on the fat. If you add any, make it a lower-fat tub margarine like Smart Beat, Promise Buttery Light, or Fleischmann's Light Soft Margarine.

But the simplest option is to skip the extra fat. Most mixes tasted just fine without it (we didn't add any to the numbers in the chart).

Exception: Pestos need some oil, though less than the two tablespoons that some packages recommend (we added two teaspoons to the numbers in the chart). To boost the richness of creamy or cheesy pastas, try using Land O Lakes Fat Free Half & Half instead of low-fat or fat-flee milk (we added fat-free to the numbers in the chart).

3. Split the seasoning (or cheese) packet. Pasta has virtually no sodium, but by the time some companies are through with it, the sky's the limit. Industry leaders like Kraft, Lipton, and Pasta Roni sell pastas with more than 1,000 mg of sodium in each cup.

Many of Annie's variations-on-macaroni-and-cheese manage to stay below our Best Bite limit--480 mg of sodium per serving. And you couldn't ask for better taste. Ditto for Bella Pronto pestos and some Near East pastas and Marrakesh Express and Bean Cuisine bean-and-pastas.

(Note: the Bean Cuisine numbers in our chart include about half a cup of added chicken broth. They can take the sodium, since Bean Cuisine is the only brand we found with no salt in the seasoning packet.)

If you want to expand your lower-sodium options, try using only part of the seasoning or cheese packet that comes in most boxes.

We gave an Honorable Mention to pastas that had less than 480 mg of sodium using half the packet (although the numbers in the chart are for the full packet). Take it from us: Near East Angel Hair with Spicy Tomato couldn't get any better. Kraft, Betty Crocker, and Pasta Roni Honorable Mentions had no less appeal with half the packet, either.

4. Turn it into a meal. If your meal already has chicken, beans, vegetables, etc., pasta may be all you need. If not, check the package for "stir-in ideas" like chopped tomato, broccoli florets, roasted red bell peppers, thawed frozen spinach, beans, chicken, shrimp, etc.