Penne

This dish is comforting yet elegant, which is why I like to serve it at gatherings during the winter holidays. Best of all, it’s a very quick and easy go-to recipe for when you’re short on time and need to deliver something special.

When my family and I made trips back to Italy to visit my grandfather’s family in Naples, his sisters often made one of these impressive timbales. It looked a bit plain on the outside, but when you cut into it, it was always filled with a delicious mixture, and as a kid I thought it was just so cool. I still do.

With its Old World flavors and tempting aroma, this versatile dish is a big hit at potluck suppers. Depending on whether you use the main recipe or one of the variations, you can create an entrée, a one-dish meal, or a side dish from the same basic ingredients

If you prefer, you can always substitute a brown rice, whole-wheat, or whole-grain pasta for the fiber-enriched variety. I get a lot of letters and e-mails from home cooks around the country saying they are able to make my recipes for the whole family even though their spouses and children won’t generally eat healthy food, because my recipes actually taste fattening. To keep with that tradition, I opt for the fiber-enriched pasta since it adds needed fiber to our diets while still tasting more like traditional pasta.

Bocconcini, literally “little mouthfuls,” are small rounds of fresh mozzarella that are often sold wherever larger rounds of fresh mozzarella are made. (If you can find bocconcini made from water buffalo’s milk, they’re even better for this pasta.) Bocconcini can vary in size from store to store. If yours are larger than the type called ciliege (cherries), you may want to cut them into quarters, so they fit neatly on a spoon alongside the pasta. If you can’t find bocconcini of any type, cut larger pieces of fresh mozzarella into 1-inch cubes.

I like to eat the pasta hot with room-temperature sauce, but you could just as well serve it all cold. In that case, toss the tomatoes and pasta while still hot, then set them aside until you’re ready to serve them. Finish the pasta by tossing in the basil and bocconcini and serve. I can go on detailing recipes with minimal changes in the ingredient list or techniques, but what I want to leave with you is not only recipes but the understanding, and hence the liberty and confidence, to deviate from the recipe path and come up with a version of the plate that reflects your personal taste and local produce. When you reach this point, cooking is truly a joy.

The dirty little secret about Penne alla Vodka is not the vodka but the hefty amount of heavy cream. Vodka is colorless, odorless, and without much flavor—not really attributes of a superstar ingredient. It’s the combination of cream and tomato sauce that gives this dish its signature flavor. The traditional cream is swapped here for low-fat Greek yogurt.

It’s the combination of bitter broccoli rabe and hot sausage that makes this one of the greatest Italian-American dishes. My mother began making this when my Uncle Joe became a butcher and could provide an unlimited supply of his own handmade pork-and-fennel sausages. It’s still one of my favorites of Mama’s dishes. Here I use whole-wheat penne and low-fat turkey sausage—but the rest I left just like Mama’s.

Talk about flexible, this chicken is a cheerleader. Yes, it’s equally good steaming hot or icebox cold. Eat this dish four seasons of the year, hot or not, indoors or out. It’s G-R-E-A-T . . . great!

Pasta with butter, ricotta, and Parm cheese is an Italian children’s standard. Add a little broccoli—we grown-ups need our fiber—then be a kid again and enjoy.

With veggies and pasta in one dish, there’s no need to make any sides—plus, you only have to wash one pot!

This dish can be made 100 ways. It’s one of the first dishes you eat as an Italian kid: macaroni with butter and ricotta cheese. Once you grow up, you add stuff in, but the base remains the same. I’ll try to limit myself and just give you my top five versions.

Puttanesca is a sauce named after streetwalkers. The ladies would make pots of a fishy-smelling mixture of tomatoes, anchovies, and garlic and leave the pots in brothel windows to attract fishermen in like stray cats. After the business was done, the sauce was tossed with pasta and became their dinner, or breakfast. This is a very unappetizing story for such a delicious dish, so when I am asked what “it” means, I tell a slightly less descriptive version, which you can pass along: Puttanesca is the sauce of the ladies of the night because it’s spicy, fast, and easy! (It still makes me blush, but at least I remain hungry.)

I love this dish, Pasta alla Norma. Traditionally, it is made with 1 whole cup of EVOO and lots of chopped baby eggplant. It’s good, but if you don’t find just the right eggplant to use, the dish can be greasy and bitter. The recipe below is a take-off on Norma that includes all the same elements, but it is never bitter and uses much less oil (making Norma’s figure a little better!).

Serve with crusty bread.

Roasting brings out the sweetness of vegetables and intensifies their fresh flavors. Vary the vegetables if you wish, but follow this general pattern: Roast the vegetables, remove skins if necessary, puree, and flavor the puree with fresh herbs or garlic. Serve over hot pasta or use as a sauce for lasagna.

I love baked pastas of all kinds (as you probably know), as long as the gratinato, the cheese topping, is properly applied with a light touch, and baked sufficiently, so the cheese is deeply colored, melted, and perfectly crisp at the same time. This Calabrian baked cavatappi has two touches I particularly appreciate: a layer of sliced hard-cooked eggs inside (lending more taste and more protein), and an extra dimension of crunch from bread crumbs on top. You can enhance many other baked pasta recipes this way.

The marvelous melting qualities of authentic fontina are particularly evident in baked pasta dishes such as this delicious pasticcio. When it is in the oven with penne (or other tubular or concave pastas, like ziti, rigatoni, or shells), the molten cheese oozes around each piece of pasta and is caught in all of its nooks and crannies. The cheese on top of the pasticcio melts and then becomes crusty and caramelized.

My mom used to make this yummy, Parmesan-and-broccoli-flecked pasta a lot when we were growing up because it was a relatively painless way to get us kids to eat broccoli. And when I went to college, she packed up the recipe for me as part of a set of family recipes that she thought would be easy enough for me to make in my new apartment. This was one of the first dishes I had the courage to cook on my own, and it became a staple of my college years. But leaving home isn't so easy. I remember the first time I set out to cook this in my new life. It wasn't until I was at the grocery store with recipe in hand that I realized that I couldn't actually read it: I never could read my mom's handwriting—I'm forever calling her up to ask her to translate her scrawl. But there I was, first time out, walking up to strangers in the supermarket asking, "Can you read this?" These days, my friends have a habit of calling me from the supermarket at five p.m., looking for a suggestion for dinner. This is the recipe I give them because it's completely easy and if it's five o'clock and you're still in the supermarket, you can still be eating by six fifteen (assuming you don't live too far away). Note that the broccoli cooks long enough to turn soft and buttery. When you work it all together with your wooden spoon—broccoli, olive oil, and cheese—the broccoli turns into the sauce. Use a colander with fairly small holes (or a mesh strainer) so that the broccoli buds don't escape into the sink when you drain the pasta.

For the pesto mixture, executive food editor Kemp M. Minifie switches from pine nuts to pumpkin seeds or sunflower seeds, and she incorporates flat-leaf parsley in with the basil. To top it all off she adds homemade bread crumbs. It's not quite Italian anymore, but it works.

A hearty bowl of pasta plus savory cheese? You'd never know this whole-grain comfort food is diet-friendly! Squash supplies all the vitamin A you need for the day.