Whole grain badness

There is a lot of pasta in my pantry. I like the stuff and it's great for refueling after my vain attempts at running. It goes well with lots of things and it's cheap.

Then I saw boxes of whole grain pasta. I had heard that some aren't so great, but the nutritive elements outweigh the semi-bland taste. Whole grain foods can help keep your heart healthy and provide more vitamins than their more homogenized counterparts.

So I thought I'd give it a shot. Whole grain pasta can't be all that bad since it's not 100% whole grain, right?

Wrong.

Whole grain pasta sucks and I tried my hardest to like it.

The first time I tried it, I had it covered in generous amounts of sun-dried tomato pesto. The pesto was fantastic; the pasta was cardboard.

I thought maybe I undercooked it and that it would be fine if I added a little salt the next time.

Still wrong.

This last time I tried to eat the stuff, I did my best to make it tasty. I thinned some alfredo sauce with a little milk and added a few things. I threw in sautéed mushrooms, Italian seasoning, garlic salt and black olives. I even cooked the pasta a little longer to see if that would help.

It didn't.

So, for dinner at work, I had very nicely dressed cardboard. (Excuse the lovely plating, but I was dashing off to my night shift.) Sure, the sauce would have been better with grilled chicken and fresh basil leaves added, but it still wouldn't have saved the pasta.

The texture is mealy and unpleasant. The taste is like stale Cheerios, but then again it doesn't taste like anything. It's just ... there. It's this blah stuff in your mouth that you know tastes the way it does because it's good for you.

That's the worst part right there. You know you're doing yourself a favor by eating it, but it's such a damn chore to eat that you don't care.

Bleh.