Italian Recipes
1424 recipes found
Baked Ziti
This baked ziti is layered almost like a lasagna to ensure every bite has enough creamy ricotta, stringy mozzarella and tangy tomato sauce. But the key to its success comes from undercooking the pasta during the initial boil so it stays perfectly al dente, even after a trip to the oven. Heavy cream is added to prevent the ricotta from becoming grainy or dry during baking, letting it be its most luscious self. While this baked ziti is meatless (there’s plenty of richness from the cheese — three types, to be exact), you could always incorporate a bit of sausage, ground meat or pancetta, if you like. Simply add 1/2 pound to the onions while sautéeing and proceed with the recipe.
Lasagna With Spicy Roasted Cauliflower
Now that I’ve discovered how delicious roasted cauliflower is and how easy it is to do it, that’s the only way I want to cook it. It might be difficult to abstain from eating the cauliflower before you’ve gotten it into your lasagna.
Handmade Lasagna Sheets
There’s nothing quite like lasagna made with thin, silky sheets of fresh pasta. The noodles absorb the sauces as the dish bakes, and everything separate becomes one. Each bite will melt in your mouth. When rolling out the dough, sprinkle generously with flour to prevent sticking. And if you can’t cook the pasta right away, make sure to spread flour abundantly between each sheet because the longer it sits, the more it will threaten to stick back together. If after assembling the lasagna you are left with uncooked sheets of pasta, cut them into noodles, toss with flour, and freeze on a baking sheet in a single layer before transferring into a freezer bag. Freeze for up to a month, and to cook, just drop into boiling, salted water.
Stuffed Shells Filled With Spinach and Ricotta
These are comforting and easy to put together. You can make them ahead and heat them in the oven when you’re ready for dinner.
Lentil, Celery and Tomato Minestrone
Minestrone might be a familiar soup, but here it takes on a new flavor: celery. The celery, which may be lingering in the fridge having played a minor part in another recipe, adds a dimension of flavor to the mix that ordinary minestrone just doesn’t have. Celery has long been used in Chinese medicine to help control high blood pressure. It is also an excellent source of Vitamins K and C, and a very good source of potassium, folate, dietary fiber, molybdenum, manganese, and Vitamin B6.
Lentil Minestrone With Greens
A number of greens work well in this hearty Italian dish. Chard and turnip greens are growing in my garden, so those are ones I’m using now, but I wouldn’t hesitate to use kale, either.
Chicken Cacciatore
This classic Italian dish must have hundreds of versions, all resulting in a rustic braise of chicken, aromatic vegetables and tomatoes. My version includes lots of mushrooms, both dried and fresh. You can add kale to the dish if you want to work in some leafy greens (see variation below). You can increase or decrease the number of chicken pieces according to your needs. This stew freezes well; thaw it overnight in the refrigerator for the next night’s dinner. If the stew doesn’t thaw completely, heat gently in a casserole or use your microwave’s defrost function.
Lasagna With Tomato Sauce and Roasted Eggplant
This is a great do-ahead dish. I made two of them for a dinner party during a very busy week; I roasted the eggplant one day, made the sauce another, assembled the lasagnas quickly on the morning of my dinner party and refrigerated them until I got home about an hour before my guests were due to arrive.
Roasted Cauliflower and Broccoli With Salsa Verde
This recipe came to The Times in 2004, when Julia Moskin wrote a story about the developing culinary culture in McCarthy and Kennicott, two tiny villages in the hinterlands of Alaska. ("Out here, you have a choice," said Mark Vail, a former Air Force cook who lives in McCarthy year-round. "You can live on ramen noodles and baked beans, or you can learn to cook.") Kirsten Richardson, a resident of Kennicott and a cook at the McCarthy Lodge, a local restaurant, developed this brightly-flavored riff on the weeknight vegetable. Just roast the broccoli and cauliflower, toss with a shallot-anchovy vinaigrette and toasted almonds then sprinkle with chopped parsley. It makes a satisfying mostly-meatless main or a delicious accompaniment to roast chicken.
No-Frills Risotto
Hazelnut Biscotti
Spiced Amaretti
Shaddock’s Fizz
Pasta With Caramelized Cabbage, Anchovies and Bread Crumbs
This dish is hearty and robust, with a savory backbone from the anchovies, sage and pecorino, as well as a bite from the red chile flakes. (A note to anchovy haters: add them anyway. They dissolve into the sauce and add complexity without any fishiness.) Although I used regular pasta, I think farro pasta or whole-wheat pasta would also have stood up to the brawny flavors of the dish. Or, if you wanted to take this in a meatier direction, you could substitute bacon for anchovies, reducing the olive oil and using some of the bacon fat to cook the cabbage. Pork products and cabbage are a match made in heaven, or at least in much of Eastern Europe.
Roasted Grape and Butternut Squash Bruschetta
Rob Beasley, the chef at the Chaumette Vineyard and Winery in Ste. Genevieve, Mo., created these bruschetta to show off the flavors of fall. He uses the coeur de clos cheese made a short drive away at Baetje Farms. It’s a Camembert-style cheese from goat and sheep milk. It works well in this recipe, but a fresh chévre is perfect, too.
Grilled Chicken Parm
Chicken parm – crisp chicken served with tomato sauce, draped in mozzarella and anointed with grated Parmesan, served perhaps on a hero roll or beside a tangle of pasta – is among the finest dishes of the Italian diaspora in America. There is sweetness and salt to the dish, along with the base creaminess of cheese and the satisfying crunch of the chicken’s crust. These combine, especially under a spray of red pepper flakes, to deliver immense satisfaction. This recipe, adapted from one the chef Justin Bazdarich uses at the Speedy Romeo restaurants in New York, moves the preparation of the dish to the grill, and delivers a dish that is smoke-scented and beautiful, with flavors that manage to be both delicate and robust.
Ribollita
Even vegetable stews can have more vegetables. This recipe adds a pound of kale -- that's right, a full pound -- to softened onions, carrots and celery, combined with beans and tomatoes. It's simply a matter of bringing the other vegetables together in a simmer, then adding the kale and topping with the toast. The whole dish bakes in the oven for a few minutes to brown the toast with a little Parmesan.
Grilled Caesar Salad
This recipe, from Alan Ashkinaze of the now-closed Millesime in Manhattan, came to The Times in 2012. In his version of the classic Caesar salad, a light grilling enhances the flavor of the romaine lettuce, which is then brushed with a dressing brightened by lime juice. The whole thing is finished with Parmesan, toasted on the grill. It comes together quickly, and it’s a perfect pairing for a rib-eye, served along with a deep red.
Grilled Summer Beans With Garlic and Herbs
Green beans don’t number among the vegetables we normally grill — eggplants, onions, peppers, zucchini — but there’s something about the high, dry heat of the fire and the gentle scent of smoke that heightens their snap and natural sweetness. But how do you grill a vegetable so slender it seems doomed to fall between the bars of the grate? The secret is to use a meshed grill basket, which lets enough fire through to char the beans and enough smoke through to perfume them. The New York chef Missy Robbins grills Romano beans (a.k.a. flat or pole beans), whose shape maximizes the surface area exposed to the fire. If unavailable, substitute conventional green beans or haricots verts. The Italian inspiration for this dish is evident in the garlic, basil, mint and extra-virgin olive oil, but grilling the beans over a wood fire, instead of boiling, is uniquely and distinctly American. If necessary, you can use charcoal rather than wood; a gas grill is fine if that's what you have.
Grilled or Roasted Pattypan “Steaks” With Italian Salsa Verde
Cut into thick slices, pattypan squash, which look sort of like small flying saucers, can make a juicy sort of “steak” that could be topped by a pungent sauce. Grill or roast the “steaks” and serve them with this gorgeous green sauce. You’ll need only half the amount of salsa verde that this recipe yields, but it keeps very well in the refrigerator and it’s great to have on hand.
Roman Breakfast Cake
Of course this cake is good at lunch, at dinner, after school, afternoon or after midnight, but I call it a breakfast cake because it reminds me of a lemon cake I had with coffee every morning that I was in Rome. The cake is tall and golden, lightly lemony and most like a sponge cake — it’s soft and stretchy: Pull it gently, and it will tug itself back into shape. If you have a tube pan, use it; if you don’t, choose a Bundt pan with as few curves, crannies and crenellations as possible (fewer nooks make unmolding easier). When there are berries in the market, I fold them into the batter at the end. During the rest of the year, I go with straight lemon, although you could certainly make this cake with orange or a mix of citrus. Like so many of my favorite recipes, this is one that you can play with.
Orzo With Fresh Tomato
Rao’s Chicken Scarpariello (Shoemaker’s Chicken)
Chicken scarpariello, also known as shoemaker's chicken, is a classic Italian-American dish of chicken, sausage, vinegar, onions and peppers that has all the flavors and textures: Tangy and rich, spicy and sweet, tender and crunchy. Our version is adapted from one found on the menu at Rao's, the reservations-impossible Southern Italian restaurant and celebrity hangout in Harlem. It starts with pan-frying chicken pieces and Italian sausage in a little olive oil until golden brown. Bell peppers, jalapeños, onion and garlic go into the pan and are sautéed until soft. All of that – plus hot peppers, potatoes, vinegar and wine – goes into a roasting pan and into a hot oven until the sauce thickens and the chicken is cooked through. (The potatoes are totally optional, by the way, but they are a nice, pillowy counterpoint to the prickly heat of the peppers.) Serve with a hunk of good bread to mop up the sauce.
Braised Ligurian Chicken
This dish came to The Times in a 2003 article about Jamie Oliver: "What I found quite interesting with this dish, being English," Mr. Oliver said, "is that when you eat this, it's quite delicately flavored. It's perfumed with the wine and the rosemary. You get this kind of meaty kind of saltiness from the olives, and what's really interesting is if an English housewife got hold of the recipe, she'd probably stone the olives and have quite a lot of them. But in Italy, literally for eight people they put that much and they leave the pits in." In his hand, he cradled about two dozen olives. Mr. Oliver continued: "When you cook olives whole like this, it's almost like an anchovy. The salt comes out of the olives, and the olive becomes more like a vegetable. And the salt from the olive flavors the chicken really wonderfully." This is an adaptation of his recipe.