While pasta with basil pesto sauce is pretty much heaven on Earth, pasta with a spinach pesto sauce is a good alternative. Sure, it’s summer, and your basil is growing like a weed, but spinach is available year round so you can make this dish any time. We didn’t have mint, so we substituted it [...]

After roasting 10 pounds of second tomatoes and making soup, we used the rest of the tomatoes to make a meat sauce for lasagna. Instead of the two 28 ounce cans of tomatoes that the recipe calls for, we used about 3 pounds of roasted tomatoes.

Pasta Puttanesca is one of our favorite pasta dishes. It's basically our "go-to" pasta recipe. The other day we were getting ready to make it and went to cookography to look up the recipe, only to discover that we've never posted it! A serious oversight on [...]

As someone who is a full 50 percent Italian, I’m almost embarrassed to say that I’ve never made homemade meatballs…until now! We were making homemade pasta one night and the desire for meatballs and tomato sauce was too great to ignore. The recipe says to use a “light touch” when forming the meatballs. I’d say using [...]

This is a quick dish you can throw together in a hurry. It was inspired by a nice bunch of chives I picked up at the farmers’ market which I had no plans for. We used rotini, but fresh pasta would probably work better.

We had a bunch of cream left over after making Kim’s Yummy Pasta and we were trying to come up with some ideas for dinner. After poking around our recipes we came across this recipe for a Vodka Cream Sauce. Instead of using boxed pasta we went for some fresh pasta. I read somewhere that [...]

Kim is our friend. And this is actually her grandmother’s recipe. It’s a very old school Italian dish—hearty and filling. Perfect for a fall or winter evening. The main ingredients (besides the pasta) are carrots, celery and onions, which is the classic combination for starting any soup or meat dish. So, while you may not [...]

Gnocchi can be a scary… but really it is one of the simplest pastas out there. The only complicated part is baking the potatoes needed for traditional gnocchi. However if you use canned pumpkin puree you can make delicious, colorful gnocchi in no time at all. After boiling the gnocchi you can toss them with a [...]

Fresh pasta is ridiculously easy… if you have the right tools. The very basics requirements are a mixing bowl, and a hand cranked pasta roller and cutter. It is pretty easy to mix up a pasta dough by hand, and it is even easier to just toss everything in the food processor and mix [...]

A lot of risottos end up being being heavy and better suited for winter or the fall, but the lemon and parsley make this one perfect for spring. Carolyn had clipped this out of Real Simple and been wanting to make it for a while. It came out great, and tasted even better the next [...]