Italian Recipes
1418 recipes found

Dolly Sinatra's Marinara Sauce

Ziti With Sausage, Sweet Corn, Broccoli and Tomatoes
When your body craves vegetables, but your mind craves pasta and meat, this 30-minute pasta dish is a happy compromise. It's loaded with fresh cherry tomatoes, corn and broccoli, and the Italian sausage (hot or sweet) adds flavor and heft. Whatever you do, don't feel wed to the recipe. Use cauliflower in the place of broccoli, chicken sausage instead of pork, chopped plum tomatoes instead of cherry. It's the kind of recipe that can be a little different (in a good way) every time you make it depending on what's in your vegetable drawer or C.S.A. box. Also, don't forget taste and season well with salt and pepper as you go. The vegetables need a little seasoning to stand up to the assertive flavors of the sausage and garlic.

Pasta Alla Gricia
The star here is guanciale, which is cured jowl. It is increasingly easy to find, but if you don't have it, use pancetta or even bacon. (It won't be authentic, but it will be really good.)

James Beard’s Pleasant Pasta
Here's an absolutely lovely weeknight pasta dish that's a triple threat: It's easy, it's quick and it's delicious. Here's what you do: As the spaghetti boils, simmer some green peas with a little water until they're hot (or just dump the frozen peas in with the boiling pasta a couple minutes before the timer is set to ding). Drain the pasta and return to the pot with a button of butter. Add peas, prosciutto and cream and toss to coat. Season well with salt, pepper and grated Parmesan. Toss some more. Serve and swoon.

Mark Bittman's Pasta With Clams
Here is a simple, elegant take on pasta with clam sauce that serves as a beautiful, light dinner with salad, perfect in advance of a movie night or reading session on the couch with family or friends. The key to its success is using less pasta that you generally might, which helps place the focus of the dish squarely on the meaty clams.

Pasta Aglio, Olio e Peperoncino
This late-night Roman staple is astonishingly full-flavored. Start the water before you do anything else, because the sauce takes less than 10 minutes start to finish.

Pasta With Fresh Herbs, Lemon and Peas
Buy a bunch of parsley along with basil or chives to keep on hand in your refrigerator. The herbs will keep for a week if properly stored. Produce departments often use misters, but greens don’t keep well once wet. When you get home, spin the herbs in salad spinner if they’re wet, wrap them in a paper towel and then bag them.

Pasta With Sardines and Fennel
This traditional Sicilian dish makes a festive main course, especially when served from a giant platter. Sweet and savory flavors mingle beautifully here, with currants, raisins, saffron and pine nuts. Aromatic wild fennel fronds and fresh sardines are preferred, but even if made with cultivated fennel and canned sardines, this is a magnificent dish.

Pamela Sherrid's Summer Pasta
Pamela Sherrid’s summer pasta, which The Times ran a recipe for in 1996, is a quintessential crossover dish: part tomatoes and warm pasta, part pasta salad and the best of both. It includes ripe summer tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, basil and cubes of fresh mozzarella. Ms. Sherrid’s recipe relies on prudent technique and a slacker’s sense of pace. First you combine the garlic, basil and oil and let the mixture macerate. A few hours later you add tomatoes and let it sit some more. Next, you pour the cooked rigatoni over the tomatoes, and cubes of mozzarella over the rigatoni. Then you gently mix the cheese into the pasta, coating it with a buttery veil of fat, before tossing it with the tomatoes at the bottom. If you have great tomatoes and mozzarella and you don’t overcook the pasta, it is a remarkably good dish. A puddle of sweet and salty tomato broth will form at the bottom of your bowl, so make sure you have some bread on hand to soak it up.

Roasted Eggplant and Tomato Pasta
This summery pasta is just as much about the vegetables as it is about the pasta itself. The star of the dish is the roasted eggplant, which caramelizes and softens in the oven. Those tender browned cubes then get tossed with cooked pasta and a quickly made sauce of fresh grated tomatoes, capers and chile flakes. Because the tomatoes need to be ripe and soft enough to fall into a purée when you rub the cut sides over the holes of a grater, heirloom tomatoes (which haven’t been bred for sturdiness during shipping) are a good choice here. But any juicy, flavorful, fleshy tomatoes will work. The cheese at the end is strictly optional, as is the butter. If you don’t eat dairy, feel free to leave them out.

Pasta With Tomatoes, Capers, Olives and Breadcrumbs
Bread crumbs, crisped in olive oil with garlic, make a flavorful addition to just about any pasta. Make your own bread crumbs if you’ve got bread that’s drying out, and keep them in the freezer.

Fresh Fettuccine With Butter, Peas and Sage Sauce

Greens Frittata With Mozzarella and Prosciutto
This savory frittata will take about 15 minutes, including the cooking time, putting weeknight dinner on the fast track. Add ribbons of raw greens to beaten eggs, then proceed to make the frittata, flipping it like a big pancake. The greens are cooked in the process, and the flavor is phenomenal.

Beet Greens Frittata
The New York City Greenmarket Web site has a handy table that shows what’s available during each month of the year. It tells me, for example, that fresh beets are available from June through November, but that you can count on the greens only through September. Use whatever color beet you choose for this recipes. The red ones will be higher in anthocyanins, the pigment-based phytonutrients that are believed to have strong antioxidant properties. But yellow and pink beets have a lot going for them nutritionally as well. All beets are rich in folates, potassium and the B-complex vitamins niacin, pantothenic acid and pyridoxine. This is one of the most versatile dishes you can make with beet greens. Cut the frittata into wedges and serve as a main dish or into smaller diamonds and serve as an hors d’oeuvre. It packs well in a lunchbox, too.

Italian Ricotta Cookies
Jessica Hulett’s tender, cakey ricotta cookies taste like the white part of the best black and white cookie you've ever had. The recipe comes from Ms. Hulett’s grandmother Dorie, who used to flavor the cookies with anise, if she used flavoring at all. Adding lemon zest gives the cookies a fragrant brightness. We approve.

Eggplant Caponata Crostini
Here is an easy, fast recipe for an appetizer redolent with the deep flavors of summer. Wait until the caponata is finished before toasting the bread. (The New York Times)

Fregola With Corn

Asparagus Frittata With Burrata and Herb Pesto
Frittata, the savory Italian egg dish, can be thick or thin, flipped in the pan or finished under the broiler. This one, slathered with creamy burrata and drizzled with herb-laden oil, is a rather deluxe version of the ideal, worthy of a weekend lunch or a late dinner.

Fennel-Seed Gnocchi

Italian Lemon-Ricotta Cake
Migliaccio, often served at Carnival, is a lemon-ricotta cheesecake with a difference: a base of semolina flour, which makes it lighter than your typical cheesecake.

Nutella Panna Cotta
Set with gelatin instead of egg yolks, panna cottas are lighter - and easier to prepare - than most puddings. This one owes its richness of flavor to a healthy dose of Nutella and bittersweet chocolate.

Baked Pesto Lasagna

Lemon Gelato
A proper Italian gelato di crema is sort of like vanilla ice cream, only in place of vanilla, you infuse the milk with a modest grating or shaving of lemon zest. This doesn't turn it into lemon ice cream, itself a cool dollop of heaven. What happens, rather, is that the small-volume scent of lemon makes the eggs eggier and the custard creamier. In short, we're talking platonic ideal of ice cream.

Jamie Oliver’s Pappardelle With Beef Ragu
This wonderful recipe from Jamie Oliver is hearty and uncomplicated with a surprising pop of flavor thanks to the addition of rosemary and orange zest. Mr. Oliver prepares his in a pressure cooker, but if you don't have one, it can be cooked in a covered Dutch oven on the stove over low heat, or in a 275 degree oven, for about 3 hours. Stir occasionally.