Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights | William Morrow, 2010 | Serves 4

“Whore’s pasta.” Was ever a name so perfectly suited to a dish? This is edgy, spicy, and just the right side of wrong, conjuring up visions of Neapolitan streets and dangerous women in tight dresses.–Sophie Dahl

LC Hurry It Up Already! Note: When time constraints scream for takeout, consider tossing together this weeknight-friendly pasta instead. The truly impatient should note that this quick recipe can be made even more quickly by relying on a pinch of red pepper flakes rather than a tediously chopped fresh chile and a smidgen of anchovy paste from a tube rather than the slippery real deal. There. That’s one supper situation solved. As for the rest of the week, we’d be quite happy to cook from this book every night, although perhaps that’s in part because we like how it uses the word “Voluptuous” in the title…

Active time: 5 minutes | Total time: 30 minutes

Pasta Puttanesca Recipe

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Melissa Clark | Cook This Now | Hyperion, 2011 | Serves 6

Like most little kids, my daughter Dahlia loves macaroni and cheese, and I‘ve made it for her in many guises, running the gamut of techniques. My aim is always the same — to make the dish quickly with a minimum of fuss, and to use a maximum of vegetables that she will tolerate and not pick out.

This is one of both our favorites. It’s comforting, crusty topped, soft centered, and very cheesy – but not at all sophisticated. Just simple, kid-friendly, homemade food with the added grown-up appeal of lots of healthful carrots tossed into the mix. I got the idea from a chef’s recipe in a glossy food magazine. I decided to come up with my own simplified and ultra-Cheddary version. It was a huge hit with the under-three crowd and their parents, too. It’s a straightforward recipe that comes together without much fuss, other than having to grate some carrots. But to make up for that, I’ve eliminated the need to make a cheese sauce on the top of the stove. Instead, I toss the hot pasta with grated cheddar, butter, sour cream for creaminess, and eggs to hold it all together. The grated carrots get boiled along with the pasta, so cooking them isn’t an extra step. And the tiny orange shreds look so much like the cheddar that your kids might not even notice they are there. Dahlia certainly hasn’t, and while I’ve never lied to her about their inclusion, I might have left out the word carrot in the dish description — accidentally, of course.–Melissa Clark

LC Getting By With A Little Help From Your Friends Note: There’s not always room in a recipe for all the tricks and tactics that a cookbook author has come to learn in making a recipe over and over and over again. Fortunately, cookbook author and recipe conjurer Melissa Clark  also considers herself a friend to readers, so she has has these additional tricks, tactics, and tips to share:

–This is one of those macaroni and cheeses with an eggy custard base that puffs as it cooks and is cut into squares, like a casserole, as opposed to that gooey, creamy, stove-top béchamel sauce version. I know some people have strong opinions about what constitutes a proper mac and cheese–I’m an equal opportunist myself, but thought I’d let you know what you’re getting yourself into before starting the recipe.

–If grating the Cheddar cheese in a food processor, you don’t need to clean it before grating the carrots–or vice versa.

–You can vary the cheese to give this rather plain (if tasty) dish more personality. Gruyère, aged Cheddar, pecorino, and aged Gouda will all add a sophisticated allure that will raise it above mere kids’ food.

–Feed this dish to the kids as is; grown-ups should indulge with a squirt of fiery Sriracha or other hot sauce all over the top.

Active time: 20 minutes | Total time: 1 hour.

Mac and Cheese with Carrots Recipe

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Julia della Croce | Italian Home Cooking | Kyle Books, 2010 | Serves 4 children or 2 adults

Nothing is more emblematic of an Italian childhood than pastina (literally, “little pasta”) with butter and milk. It’s baby’s first solid food, remembered in adulthood with great nostalgia. There are many different varieties of pastina, including anellini (“little rings”), stelline (“little stars”), acini de pepe (“peppercorns”), funghetti (“little mushrooms”), alfabeti (“alphabets”), and orzo (“barley”), to name a few of the most common.–Julia Della Croce

LC Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star Note: Soooo cute, right? But not so cute that adults can’t sit down to pastina for dinner once in a while alongside the kids–especially after one of those days, when these little stars makes everything better in the twinkling of an eye. So when you wish upon a star, wish hard for Pastina Stars with Butter and Milk. You’ll thank us.

Active time: 10 minutes | Total time: 20 minutes.

Pastina Stars with Butter and Milk Recipe

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Domenica Marchetti | The Glorious Pasta of Italy | Chronicle, 2011 | Serves 8 to 10

I created this hearty yet elegant pumpkin lasagne recipe for a winter dinner party. It’s a classic four-cheese lasagne with a beautiful twist: pumpkin pasta sheets. The subtle flavor and golden hue of the noodles go perfectly with the rich quartet of cheeses: mozzarella, Gorgonzola, Fontina, and Parmigiano. You can serve it as a first course, followed by a simple roast, or as a main course, accompanied by a colorful mixed-lettuce salad. You can count on your guests loving this—but don’t count on leftovers.–Domenica Marchetti

LC Pumpkin Assumption Note: Bet you thought you’d find nubs of winter squash napped with bechamel, eh? Guess again. There’s nary a chunk of roasted gourd in this lasagne recipe. Nope. Just gorgeous sheets of homemade pasta imbued with the spirit and spectacle of vibrant pureed pumpkin. No complaints here.

Active time: 40 minutes | Total time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

Pumpkin Lasagne Recipe

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Domenica Marchetti | The Glorious Pasta of Italy | Chronicle, 2011 | Makes about 1 pound

Fresh egg noodles in Italy are a gorgeous, rich golden color that is hard to replicate elsewhere. This is because of the intense red of the yolks (indeed, in Italy the yolk is referred to as il rosso, “the red”). I’m still not sure what inspired me one day to add just a little bit of pumpkin puree to my pasta dough—actually it was buttercup squash, which has sweet, dense, deep orange flesh. I happened to have some leftover in my fridge from a pumpkin cheesecake that I had made for Thanksgiving. Into the dough it went. The resulting pasta sheets were even better than I had imagined, golden in color and subtle in flavor—a perfect match for pumpkin lasagne. But you can also cut them into pappardelle or fettuccine and serve them with a simple tomato sauce.– Domenica Marchetti

LC Stealthy Surplus Pumpkin Note: What to do if you find yourself with leftover pumpkin puree? If you’re feeling a little, oh, we don’t know, intrepid, try stirring some into mac-n-cheese. It’ll bring an ever so subtle sweetness to dinner–as well as a bolder orange hue and a healthier you.

Active time: 15 minutes | Total time: 45 minutes.

Pumpkin Pasta Dough Recipe

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Real Cajun | Clarkson Potter, 2009 | Serves 6 to 8

In my opinion, there are two types of jambalaya—Cajun and Creole. The main difference is that in the Creole version, the rice is cooked in a tomatoey sauce that might include shrimp along with meat and sausage. The Cajun approach is more rustic. Searing and caramelizing the meat and onions individually prior to simmering everything together develops not just color but a deeply browned taste. I prefer the way the chicken and sausage flavor blend into the rice in the Cajun version, creating a dish with a robust meaty flavor. Reducing the chicken stock concentrates the flavor and adds a unique saltiness that you just can’t achieve by adding salt. I call it the MSG effect. (Be sure to add the vegetable trimmings to the chicken stock.) This dish becomes even more flavorful after it sits for a while, and it’s delicious at room temperature.–Donald Link

LC Cajun Cast Iron Note: The only way we can think to improve upon this authentic recipe is to insist, as the recipe already does, that you rely on a cast-iron pan. There’s nothing, not a thing, that we’d change.

Active time: 60 minutes | Total time: 4 hours

Chicken and Sausage Jambalaya Recipe

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Mario Batali | The Babbo Cookbook | Clarkson Potter, 2002 | Serves 4

Guinea hen? It’s lovely. It tastes a little like pheasant and looks a lot like chicken, though it’s far less tough and dry in texture than the former and infinitely more intriguing than the latter. As Mario Batali says in The Babbo Cookbook, from which this recipe hails, “We love guinea hen legs because they’re so moist and juicy.” There you have it. Though he adds that chicken legs would work just as well. As for fregula (also sometimes known as fregola), it’s a diminutive and different kind of semolina pasta. –Renee Schettler Rossi

LC Got Guinea? Note: Maybe you’ve never seen guinea at your local market or butcher. That may have a lot to do with the fact that you’ve never looked for it. It’s often there, particularly in late summer and fall. If not, just ask. Often a simple request is all it takes to get your butcher to stock it or, at the very least, to special order it for you. Once it’s in, smile sweetly and ask him to bone it for you—though we’re offering no guarantees on that front. And don’t write off fregula just yet. If you can’t find it—and you don’t know that you can’t until you try, right?—Israeli couscous works splendidly in its place.

Active time: 40 minutes | Total time: 50 minutes, not including time for marinating.

Guinea Hen with Sweet Corn Fregula Recipe

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Domenica Marchetti | The Glorious Pasta of Italy | Chronicle, 2011 | Makes 4 servings

I dislike big food. It’s a turnoff to me. I have no desire to be supersized or doubled-down, and I refuse to let my kids partake of food that’s defined more by volume than flavor. You won’t find any of us chowing down on a bucket of popcorn at the movie theater or slurping a Big Gulp or a venti or trenta or quaranta or however many ounces we’ve worked our way up to these days.

Yet, somehow, I managed to fall in love with a giant raviolo.

In my defense, I was in Italy, where it’s possible to fall in love with anything from a lone umbrella pine perched on a hillside to the 95-year-old toothless contadina who sells perfect baby zucchini with the blossoms still attached. At the time, I happened to be in a place of rugged, unspoiled beauty: an organic caseficio (cheese farm) in Abruzzo.

The cheese maker, a large man named Gregorio Rotolo, who’s as renowned for his distinctive sheep’s milk cheeses as he is for the black woolen beanie he perpetually sports, gave my husband, my kids, and me a tour of the place and a taste of his warm ricotta, made just that morning and still draining in baskets. For a minute I thought maybe the Rapture really had come and I’d been called up. But then I opened my eyes and spied tables in the room adjacent to the cheese shop. Turns out the farm also runs a family-style restaurant. My husband and I looked at each other. We weren’t going anywhere for at least a couple of hours. The kids rolled their eyes in resignation.

Listed casually on the menu was Raviolone. Big raviolo. Big deal. More like big gimmick, I thought. We almost didn’t order it, but my curiosity kicked in. I was, after all, writing a book on the pastas of Italy.  I was expecting a plate of oversized half-moons, each maybe the size of an espresso saucer. But what arrived on a platter put my imagination to shame. It was, indeed, one raviolo, as written on the menu. A single raviolo that was nearly a foot long. As big as a bistecca or a pounded veal cutlet. It was shaped like a perfect half-moon, with a fluted border, and dressed simply, with just a little tomato sauce and a shower of cheese. It was filled with the farm’s same fresh ricotta we’d just swooned over.

The four of us marveled at it; then we divided and devoured it. The pasta was silky and tender and the ricotta filling fresh and sweet. It was outrageous and yet, at the same time, understated. It seemed, suddenly, the most natural thing to find on the menu at this restaurant tucked in these hills. Of course there existed such a wonderful form of ravioli. This was Italy.

I knew right then at the table that I’d try to re-create this marvel at home. But it wasn’t until I got back to my kitchen in Virginia that I actually considered the logistics. How in the world would I assemble such a large raviolo? How much filling would I need? How would I boil it? And once it was cooked, how would I get it out of the water in one piece?

I wish, for dramatic effect, that I could tell you it took a heroic effort on my part to master this pasta project, that I went through batch after batch of dough and tubs of ricotta, that there was failure and frustration before there was success.

But the truth is, instead of being ridiculously difficult, it was almost easy. Okay, maybe it was a little unwieldy the first one or two times, but definitely not the daunting task that I’d anticipated. Getting the thing out of the pot proved to be the biggest challenge, and even that can be accomplished with relative ease thanks to a very large skimmer.

When I cook ravioloni for my family, as I often do, I make one for each of us. It sounds downright…piggish. But when you consider that a pound of pasta dough yields just enough to make four ravioloni, it’s really no different than if I made lots of small ravioli or just cooked a pound of dried pasta.

Plus, no matter how crazy or cruddy the day has been, somehow sitting down to a dinner of giant ravioli has a way of transporting us from our everyday lives in suburban northern Virginia right back to Abruzzo—and my realization that, yes, sometimes bigger is better. —Domenica Marchetti

LC Not-So-Giant Ravioli Note: Domenica tells us you can make eight smaller ravioloni for serving as a first course to eight people by dividing the filling and dough into eight equal portions rather than four. You could. But why would you?

Special equipment Fluted pastry wheel (although a knife will do in a pinch)

Active time: 45 minutesTotal time: 1 hour, 15 minutes

Ravioloni | Giant Ravioli Recipe

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Domenica Marchetti | The Glorious Pasta of Italy | Chronicle, 2011 | Makes about 1 pound

I almost always use the food processor for this pasta dough, as it makes quick work of the task. But I feel it’s also worth knowing how to mix pasta dough by hand. For one thing, nothing chases away fear in the kitchen like rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty. For another, making pasta is a tactile experience. The more you touch and handle the pasta dough, the more familiar you’ll become with the proper consistency—how firm and how smooth it should be.

I’ve included instructions for mixing the dough in the food processor and for mixing it by hand. For the food processor method, always start with the smaller amount of flour listed in the recipe. If it’s too sticky you can always work in more flour as you knead. For the hand method, use the larger amount of flour and mound it onto your work surface, but only work in as much as you need to achieve the proper consistency. –Domenica Marchetti

LC A Noble Use of Time Note: If you have yet to travel to Italy and sit in a trattoria with a plate of proper homemade pasta in front of you, there’s only one thing that can even begin to approximate that experience. And it only takes 25 minutes. What are you waiting for?

Active time: 25 minutesTotal time: 25 minutes

Fresh Egg Pasta Dough Recipe

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Ree Drummond | Charlie the Ranch Dog | HarperCollins, 2011 | Makes 8 generous servings

Be safe! Always cook with an adult. Don’t touch sharp knives or hot stoves and ovens! And always wash your hands before and after cooking.– Ree Drummond, The Pioneer Woman

LC Cute Children’s Book Note: We think more kids’ books ought to divulge recipes, like this one from blogger and home cook The Pioneer Woman. Publishers, what say you? And moms, bear in mind, the recipe is geared towards pleasing kids—and ranch hounds—in both its wording and its ingredients. Woof!

Active time: 40 minutes Total time: 2 hours, 15 minutes

The Pioneer Woman’s Favorite Lasagna Recipe

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