The sauté can be prepared several hours ahead and tossed with the remaining ingredients just before serving. Once the pasta is in play, eat the dish while it's hot.
Ingredients
The first time I ate codette was in 1994, at Ristorante Plistia, in the National Park of Abruzzo, during a trip to Italy with my husband and my parents. The word codette translates to “little tails,” but when the restaurant’s proprietor, Cicitto Decina, brought a platter of these emerald green beauties to our table, we thought the plate was piled with steamed green beans! What a delicious surprise when we tasted the tender-chewy strands of spinach pasta freshly made by Cicitto’s wife, Laura del Principe, and demurely dressed with a sauce comprised of local sausages and peas. From that moment, Plistia became my favorite restaurant. It still is.
A favorite dish from an old teacher, this is a Chinese pasta with meat sauce. The noodles evolved from two of my favorite recipes by Chinese cookbook author, Gloria Bley Miller.
While most Italian recipes represent the foods and traditions of one town or region, this one from Le Marche has elements of Italian cooking from various parts of the country and is a good example of how Italy's cooking changed when it became a nation in 1861. The central Italian region of Le Marche is a crossroads that uses typical flavors of north, central and southern Italy. The reason for this is that Le Marche, until Italian unification, were papal lands that belonged to the Vatican but were also traversed by people traveling north and south on the Italian peninsula. This recipe uses veal and pork (found in northern and central Italian cooking), chicken livers (most common in central Italy) and tomatoes, the iconic flavor of the south. The grated cheese of choice is pecorino romano, very much part of the tradition of southern Italy. Despite the name, maccheroncelli (the pasta used here) is not macaroni used in southern Italy, but thin egg noodles. You can skip the effort of making these, if you wish, and purchase a good Italian brand of dried egg pasta such as tagliatelle or tagliolini.
Ingredients
This scramble of mild flavors, soft textures and small bites is toddler friendly. Grown-ups have been known to enjoy it, too.
Foodtalk contributor Miss Capri's Chef adapted this recipe from a dish his mother used to make. He says this version was invented "the day Tricky Dick went to the big Jell-O buffet in the sky."
Ravioli and macaroni are medieval Italian inventions, at the time so labor-intensive and expensive that only the rich could afford them. Macaroni such as penne was made in those days by rolling dough around a stick and drying it in the sun. Making pasta dough and ravioli is still time-consuming, so in this modern version of a ravioli recipe from the Middle Ages, I prepare the yummy filling ingredients as small meat patties and serve the patties in a golden medieval saffron sauce with store-bought pasta. The taste is just as spectacular, but with a fraction of the effort.