Pasta Primavera with Tomato-Corn Chowder

A really tasty dinner, though clearly a bit much for one meal. I got this cookbook a week or so ago that's based on the idea of volumetrics, which is eating food that is high in volume, but low in calories. The idea is that most people in North America have lost the ability to know when they're full based on calories, and instead believe they're full when their body feels full. (Which is the difference, I imagine, between North Americans and the French, who seem to eat a lot of high calorie food, but who don't eat as much of it as we would.)

I can't remember if it was in this book or another one that I read about a study where people we given essentially bottomless bowls of soup, though they didn't know it, it would just keep filling as they ate it, and people would eat, say, four times what they'd have eaten if they'd been given a single bowl.

At any rate, the idea here is to eat the things you like, but to eat them in ways that volume is added without adding a lot of calories, so that you can feel full, without consuming too much calories or fat or whatever. So the pasta and the soup both have lower (or no) quantities of cream and other high calorie ingredients compared to similar, traditional recipes for the same things. They also have more vegetables in them, because vegetables are pretty well always big in volume, but low in calories.

The real test was how good it would taste, and they did taste good, though I should or could anyway have added some extra pepper to both dishes. (I love pepper.) It's fortunate that I like the taste of good fresh vegetables, because that's really what I got from these. They tasted bright and fresh.

I don't particularly like the colour of the soup, though; it looks like something from a can. Although maybe not because it isn't a fake bright red like canned tomato soup. At any rate, maybe it just needs some more tomatoes to bump up the colour a bit.