Versatile, family-friendly, and delicious–pasta has everything going for it. Plus, because pasta dishes seldom call for more than a handful of ingredients, a sauté pan, and a pot of boiling water, they move quickly and easily from the stove top to the table, making them the perfect choice for cooks with busy lives.
Pasta is the ideal dish for a family weeknight supper or a Saturday dinner for company. It can be a light tangle of tagliatelle tossed with just a vegetable or two and a scattering of herbs or a hearty plate of pappardelle dressed with a slowly simmered pork ragù. It can even be prepared in advance: assemble a baked pasta a day or even weeks ahead, refrigerate or freeze it, and then slip it into the oven to bake just before your guests arrive.
In these pages, you’ll find dozens of appealing recipes, a wealth of valuable tips, and inspired ideas for putting together meals with pasta at the center. There are recipes for vegetarian, meat, and seafood pastas, for baked pastas, and for low-fat and dairy-free pastas. For a casual family dinner, you might serve spaghetti and meatballs. When guests are at the table, it is easy to introduce such special ingredients as fresh salmon, creamy burrata cheese, or homemade bread crumbs. You can even make most recipes gluten-free by using dried pasta made from brown rice, corn, or quinoa instead of wheat. You’ll also find a carefully assembled selection of sides and salads to complement whichever pasta you choose.
Finally, pasta night is all about variety. A broad range of sauces–light and lean, rich and cheesy, tomatoey, creamy, meaty, vegetarian–can be matched with an equally wide array of pasta shapes and sizes–thin strands, ribbons, tubes, short and curved, short and straight, ridged and smooth–so you’ll never run out of ideas for dinner. In other words, there is a dish to satisfy every pasta lover, young or old, finicky or easygoing, traditional or modern. But perhaps the best part of pasta night is how quickly and easily the meal comes together, leaving both the cook and the diners more time at the table.