Italian

Pumpkin ravioli is easier to find in the fall through the holidays, when the Halloween mascot is in season and on the minds of cooks. The sauce can also work nicely with any ravioli filling, but the pairing of pumpkin (or another sweet squash) with sage is particularly perfect, especially with the nutmeg and hazelnut flavors. This is truly a seasonal dish; to me, it tastes like autumn—even autumn in Southern California, where I’m from.

Lasagna is a dish that can be made ahead and can feed a crowd; it’s as easy to make for twelve as it is for four. I actually have lasagna parties where I make both the classic version and a fantastic vegetarian version (page 94), and my guests mix and match. If you make the lasagna ahead of time and serve it family style with a simple green salad as a side, you can feed a whole crowd while not spending more than five minutes in the kitchen during your party—literally, only five minutes. It can take longer just to give directions to the pizza-delivery guy.

The beauty of a baked pasta like this is that you can really use any vegetables you want, as long as you cut them all to the same size. This version uses a lot of them, because I like the variety in textures and flavors. But if you’re not a huge fan of any one of these vegetables, just omit it, and use the same quantity of another. If you prefer a simpler dish with fewer vegetables, you can do that too. It’s really up to you. You can also feel free to assemble one large lasagna in a 13 X 9-inch pan from these ingredients.

Tortellini means “tiny cakes”; they’re small pasta nuggets filled with ingredients that range from plain cheese and vegetables to meats. They’re usually served at Sunday dinners, holidays (especially on Christmas Day), or on special occasions, because making them was a laborious task. But with the premade frozen stuffed pastas now available, you can make this dish in a flash any day of the week.

A great one-dish meal in the tradition of the classic red-checkered-tablecloth, family-owned restaurant, this is Italian-American food at its best. I like to make individual portions ahead of time, and freeze them. When I get home really late from work, I just pop one in the microwave and have a full, comforting meal in mere minutes.

One of the easiest pasta dishes you’ll ever make, this is great as a light meal or as a side dish, especially for grilled fish.

Any good pesto is a great topping for toasted bread—also called crostini—but I’m especially partial to the mushroom version, which is mellower than the more herb-focused varieties.

If you love mushrooms, this sauce will hit the spot. You could use it as a topping for pastas, meats, and—my favorite—polenta. The secret to a rich, deeply flavorful sauce is to use a variety of mushrooms, preferably the wild varieties. I’m partial to cremini, oyster, and shiitake, but you could also add portobellos, hen-of-the-woods, chanterelles, or any other variety you find. The only ones I’d steer clear of are regular white button mushrooms. Their mild flavor will get lost amid the stronger tastes of the wild varieties, and their high water content will thin your sauce without providing much flavor.

In Italy this dish is known as aglio, olio, e pepperoncino. It’s thoroughly easy, with just one secret: Reserve some pasta water to make the sauce. My version of this dish adds fresh herbs; I’ve found that this combination works wonderfully, but feel free to substitute oregano, thyme, marjoram, or whichever of your favorites are fresh; dried herbs don’t work in this recipe.

In case you were wondering (you’re probably not, actually, but I’m going to tell you anyway), this sauce is named after the Marquis de Béchamel. In Italian it’s called balsamella or besciamella. The original and full French version also involves steeping some onion and a bay leaf in milk for 30 minutes, to infuse the sauce with more flavor, but here’s an everyday approach. My simplified version is a snap to make and is perfect with my Baked Rigatoni with Béchamel Sauce (page 115). You could also use it the way you would hollandaise sauce.

This is the easiest sauce you will ever make and a very tasty one, but then what doesn’t taste good when it’s drenched in butter? This is the perfect topping for stuffed pastas like ravioli, tortellini, and agnolloti.

Most of us think of bread crumbs as a coating for frying. But in Italian cooking, bread crumbs are also used as a main ingredient, as in this pasta dish. This recipe probably came about as a way to use up leftover stale bread—a humble inspiration for a fantastic dish. I love this dressing with orecchiette (“little ears”), but any small shape will do.

A spicy sauce that’s perfect tossed with pasta. Be sure to wash your arugula thoroughly, in at least two changes of cold water, to remove any soil and grit, which you definitely don’t want in your pesto.

In my family, pesto was always a green sauce. But like many people, I’ve stretched the definition of pesto and expanded its horizons. (That’s what makes cooking so much fun.) This recipe uses a combination of dried and fresh mushrooms, both of which bring their own pronounced textures and flavors to the dish. Dried porcinis are easy to find year-round. And although they’re not cheap, they’re a great pantry item that you can use to jazz up a pasta dish, make a sauce to accompany a meat dish, or, of course, use as the base of this pesto.

In the past few years, Americans have been treated to a dazzling array of new convenience food; the supermarket aisles are lined with items you can eat right now! I’m not a big fan of most of these. But I am a big fan of prewashed, pretrimmed greens, like the bags of baby spinach that are almost universally available. Cleaning fresh spinach is no treat: The bunches are filled with sand and grit, requiring multiple changes of water to remove; and it’s time-consuming to separate the fibrous stalks from the tender leaves. But these bags of baby spinach, on the other hand, are ready to go: Tear open the bag, dump the greens into a salad bowl, and they’re ready to dress. Or just toss into the sauté pan with a little olive oil and garlic, and you can be eating bright, fresh spinach in mere seconds. Or throw into the blender with some other ingredients—and bingo! Pesto!

In winter, when fresh tomatoes aren’t at their peak of ripeness and flavor, this is a great way to get your tomato fix. Sun-dried tomatoes are a wonder ingredient: They offer the rich, sweet flavors of fresh tomatoes, but they’re available year-round, they have a long pantry life, they don’t take up much room, and they pack a lot of flavor into a small punch. This pesto is a great topping for sautéed or grilled fish, and it’s also wonderful for a picnic because it can be eaten cold or hot. Also perfect over penne.

This is another straight-from-the-pantry dish for days when there’s no time to cook. My mother relied on it very heavily when I was growing up, and everyone loved it. The lemon zest wakes up all the flavors and perfumes the dish, but you could use red pepper flakes instead if you don’t have a lemon.

This is an Italian-American favorite, but I like to make my meatballs with turkey instead of the traditional pork, veal, and beef. It’s lighter and healthier, and that way I can eat it more often. Your guests will be so busy eating them that they won’t have time to ask what’s in them (they are that good), especially when they adorn a gigantic family-size platter of spaghetti or linguine.

When we were kids, this was our favorite sauce, hands down. I used to love it on everything—pasta, rice, bread, potatoes, and polenta—you name it, I covered it in bolognese. We went through a lot of it in my household. So my parents had to figure out a way to make it that was quicker than the traditional recipe, and here it is. It’s just as rich and mouthwatering as the more time-consuming traditional recipe; I promise you won’t know the difference. Now that I’m all grown up, I try not to use bolognese for everything, but it’s tempting because it’s perfect as a sauce for any type of pasta shape.

The most basic, most traditional pesto is this basil-based one that was invented in Genoa, in northern Italy; it’s bright green and wonderfully aromatic. Be sure to add your oil slowly, so that the sauce fully emulsifies—that is, all the ingredients bind together, creating a thick, uniform consistency. Lots of basil varieties are available, some sweeter, some spicier, and in fact basil is an important ingredient in the cooking of southeast Asia, especially in curries. Each variety will impart its unique flavor to a pesto, so be adventurous, and try whatever type appeals to you. Just remember: You need a lot of it, and it should be fresh and crisp, not wilted or soggy.