Vegetable

Why not cook pasta as you do risotto? That is, add broth a bit at a time and stir frequently, with the goal being a creamy, quickly made pasta (no waiting for the requisite gallon of water to boil!) that requires only marginally more attention than the standard variety. The concept is simple, it makes sense—pasta, like Arborio and other rices used for risotto, is plenty starchy enough—and it takes just the use of good-quality stock and a vegetable to make the dish delicious. If you’re using canned stock and have a little time, heat it with an onion, a carrot, and a garlic clove before beginning to add it to the pasta. And don’t salt the dish until you’re finished cooking; canned stock can be overly salty.

You can find fresh Chinese-style (and Japanese-style) wheat noodles at most supermarkets these days. They’re a great convenience food and, for some reason, seem to me more successful than prepackaged “fresh” Italian noodles. Here they’re briefly cooked and then combined with a stir-fried mixture of pork, vegetables, and Chinese sauces; it’s very much a Chinese restaurant dish. Both ground bean sauce and hoisin sauce can be found at supermarkets (if you can’t find ground bean sauce, just use a little more hoisin), but you can usually find a better selection (and higher-quality versions) at Chinese markets. Usually, the fewer ingredients they contain, the better they are.

This is about as unlikely a dish as I’ve ever come across, a soupy combination containing little more than the two main ingredients and canned tomatoes. Not only does the thought of it tweak the mind doesn’t this sound something like a bread sandwich?—but it counters a number of the conventions that have been drummed into our collective consciousness. Chief among these is that the dish is at its best when the pasta is cooked until it is fat, juice-laden, and quite soft. Here there is no need to seize the ideal moment at which the pasta is al dente; in fact you cook the pasta somewhat past that point, and it is even acceptable for it to sit for a while. Nor need you worry about the “correct” pasta shape; pasta with potatoes requires several different shapes, in varying quantities, preferably broken (it began as a way to use up the bits and pieces of dried pasta lying around in the cupboard). Finally, not only may you serve pasta with potatoes as a leftover, but it’s just as good after sitting for a day. So feel free to make a half batch of this pasta if you like, but since it’s no more work to make this amount and it keeps for days, I advise making the full recipe.

This is a technique popular in Liguria—the Italian Riviera—in which all of the clam liquid is used as part of the sauce, but without much effort. The result is delicious pasta in a little rich, thick sauce—along with a pile of clams. Use the smallest clams you can find; cockles are fine, too. Figure eight to twelve littlenecks or twenty-four cockles per person. Wash and scrub the clamshells very well, as they will cook in the sauce and any unremoved sand will find its way into your mouth. Discard any open or cracked clams before cooking; those that remain shut after cooking may be opened with a knife.

True ragu is a magnificent pasta sauce, a slow-simmered blend of meat, tomatoes, and milk. The real thing takes hours, for the meat must become tender and contribute its silkiness to the sauce, the tomatoes must dissolve, and the milk must pull the whole thing together. But a reasonable approximation of ragu can be produced using ground beef or pork or, even better, prepared Italian sausage.

One of my favorite elaborations on a simple tomato sauce is the recipe for pasta with meaty bones. It requires considerably more time but almost no extra effort, and it boasts the wonderful depth of flavor, silken texture, and satisfying chewiness of slow-cooked meat. Southern Italian in origin, it begins with bony meat (or meaty bones) and requires lengthy simmering. Otherwise, it’s little different from basic tomato sauce. Whatever you use, the idea remains constant: meat is a supporting player, not the star, so an eight- to twelve-ounce piece of veal shank, for example, provides enough meat, marrow, and gelatin to create a luxuriously rich sauce. Just cook until the meat falls off the bone, then chop it and return it to the sauce along with any marrow. This sauce is rich enough without grated cheese; a better garnish is a large handful of coarsely chopped parsley or basil. Either freshens the sauce while adding color and flavor.

Few things are simpler than a quick tomato sauce over pasta, but as an unending diet it can become somewhat tiresome. Here it’s completely jazzed by the addition of a hefty amount of garlic and a few anchovies. The transformation is as easy as it is remarkable. Canned anchovies—packed in olive oil—are the easiest to use here. Salted anchovies, if you have them, are fine also, but you must mince them first (after cleaning them, of course, which you do under running water, stripping the meat from the skeleton).

Pesto has become a staple, especially in late summer when basil is best. But pasta with pesto does have its limits; it’s simply not substantial enough to serve as a main course. The Genoese, originators of pesto, figured this out centuries ago, when they created this dish, which augments the pesto with chunks of potatoes and chopped green beans, making it a more complex, more filling, and more interesting dish. Recreating this classic dish is straightforward and easy. Note that if you start the potatoes and pasta simultaneously, then add the green beans about halfway through cooking, they will all be finished at the same time and can be drained and tossed with the sauce in a snap. This technique may sound imprecise, but it works.

The fundamental procedures required to make this pasta dish are easy, but this is as instructional as any simple recipe I know, and one that builds a wonderfully flavorful dish with just a few ingredients.

The dish has a thick creaminess that you can never duplicate with canned tomatoes, no matter how good they are. So the season when you can make it—when there are good, ripe tomatoes in the market—is fairly short; where I live, just two or at the most three months a year. There is an ideal instant for serving this sauce: When the tomatoes soften and all of their juices are in the skillet, the sauce suddenly begins to thicken. At that moment, it is at its peak; another minute or two later, many of the juices will have evaporated and, although the essence of the sauce is equally intense, it won’t coat the pasta as well. If this happens, just add a little fresh olive oil or butter to the finished dish.

There are pasta sauces you can make in the time it takes the pasta-cooking water to come to a boil, and there are those that are really fast—those that can be made in the eight to ten minutes it takes to actually cook the pasta. This is one of the latter, one that boasts just a couple of main ingredients and a supporting cast of two staples.

A quick way to add great flavor to many simple dinner dishes is already sitting in your pantry or cupboard: anchovies. Anchovies are among the original convenience foods and contribute an intense shot of complex brininess that is more like Parmigiano-Reggiano than like canned tuna. Use them, along with garlic, as the base for a bold tomato sauce or combine them, as I do here, with greens, garlic, oil, and chiles for a white sauce that packs a punch.

This dish which has zucchini as its focus—is simply amazing when made in midsummer with tender, crisp squash, but it isn’t half bad even when made in midwinter with a limp vegetable that’s traveled halfway around the world to get to your table. Either way, it is an unusual use for zucchini, which here substitutes for meat in a kind of vegetarian spaghetti carbonara, the rich pasta dish featuring eggs, bacon, and Parmigiano-Reggiano. Made with zucchini instead of bacon, the dish becomes a little less fat-laden, obviously, but it is still rich and delicious.

It is pasta’s nature to be simple. I’ve long made a vegetable sauce by poaching greens such as spinach in the pasta water, then removing them and adding the pasta, a neat trick. But my friend Jack Bishop, author of Vegetarian Italian Cooking, mentioned that he’d gone one step further, cooking the greens right in with the pasta and adding seasonings at the last minute. The method relies on the fact that there is a period of two or three minutes between the moment when the pasta’s last traces of chalkiness disappear and the point where it begins to become mushy. If, just before the pasta is done, you add the greens, whose tough stems have been removed, greens and pasta will finish cooking at the same time. When making this dish and others like it, you must adhere to the often ignored canon of allowing at least a gallon of water per pound of pasta, because you need a pot large enough to accommodate the greens and because they cannot be allowed to slow down the cooking too much

This dish is a minimalist’s take on the northern Italian autumn staple of tortelli filled with zucca, a pumpkinlike vegetable whose flesh, like that of butternut or acorn squash, is dense, orange, and somewhat sweet. The flavor and essential nature of that dish can be captured in a thirty-minute preparation that turns the classic inside out, using the squash as a sauce and sparing you the hours it would take to stuff the tortelli.

Since olive oil is the backbone of this dish, use the best you can lay your hands on and be sure to keep the heat under the oil medium-low, because you want to avoid browning the garlic at all costs. (Well, not at all costs. If you brown the garlic, you’ll have a different, more strongly flavored kind of dish, but one that is still worth eating.) Garnish with a good handful of chopped parsley. For thirty seconds’ work, this makes an almost unbelievable difference.

This Bread Casserole is a major upgrade from stuffing. Like most puddings and custards, it should be removed from the oven when it still appears slightly underdone, because its retained heat will firm it up just fine. Use good-quality white bread—torn from a loaf, not presliced—and the pudding will be much better.