Three Simple, Delicious, Go To Pasta Recipes

It’s a Pasta Party! Here are three of my favorite go-to recipes. Each is simple, delicious and can be easily adapted to what you have on hand.
Penne with Kale Pesto and Crispy Bacon is a tasty variation – and you can always use basil or arugula for the pesto.
Farfalle with Shrimp & Fennel – I’ll show you how to make a quick and delicious butter, whit wine and garlic sauce.
Fusilli with Roasted Tomato Pesto – another simple recipe that’s big on flavor and easy on prep time, and your pocket book!
All three of theses recipes are perfect for a week night dinner – simple, delicious and economical, plus I’ll tell you all how to pick the best pasta shapes for different recipes. Buon Gusto! #LidiasRecipes #LidiasItaly #LidiasKitchen #LidiaBastianich #ItalianFood #LidiasTheArtofPasta #lidiasoliveoil

00:00 – Intro
00:30 – Penne with Kale Pesto & Crispy Bacon
05:50 – Fusilli with Roasted Tomato Pesto
07:25 – Ask Lidia – Pasta Shapes
11:45 – Farfalle with Shrimp & Fennel

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Pasta party. I dress pennet to impress with this creamy kale pesto and make it even better when I add crunchy bits of bacon to it. I marry tomatoes with pesto and serve up a complex bowl of pasta that will surely become a staple in your house. Parfal a butterflyshaped pasta is the perfect carrier for this buttery white wine sauce paired with shrimp and fennel [Music] cabalonet easy fresh and nutritious. So let’s start with the base. Little bit of oil. Let’s crush some garlic. And this is some bacon, slices of bacon, uh, pancheta, whatever, whatever you have. While that is rendering, let’s put in the pasta. You know, I always tell you when you cook your pasta, put put a nice amount of water so that the pasta can turn. salted water that not overs salted but salted just to your liking. You can do more or less but if you don’t salt the water the pasta will be flat and you do not put oil in your pasta when you cook the pasta because the olive oil kind of inhibits the absorption and then the sauce doesn’t stick to the pasta. So the bacon is rendering, the pasta is cooking. Let’s make the pesto. Lots of Italian parsley. I love Italian parsley. It’s good for you. It tastes good and it’s abundant. You can get it year round. So, you know, sometimes it’s underestimated. But parsley is really very healthy for you. And dinosaur kale, this cabalonero as we call it in Italy. Just these are only the leaves. Just you can chop it a little less, but the machine will do the work. Just like that. And some garlic cloves. Okay, let’s make a pesto. Okay, some olive oil here. Sometimes if it’s not catching, you just pulsate it a little bit or you go in there with a spatula, but pulsating will should do it. Okay. So, I just Okay. Yes. And the one thing you don’t want to do, you don’t want to cook the pesto. So, we will add the pesto to the pasta just like this. Let’s add some salt. Okay. And the bacon is nice and crispy. Let me just drain out some of the fat. Okay. And I will add to this just a little bit of the pasta water. So it will make a nice sauce. And this is where I will add the pasta too. Going to put a little pepperonino in the basic sauce. Just like that. Let me pull the garlic also out of here. It has left its flavor. Uh but we want the garlic actually out. So, let’s see how the pasta is doing here. Okay. Yes, the pasta is al dente. And as you can see, I don’t even drain it. I use this wonderful instrument here to dish out that pasta right into the sauce and toss the pasta with the bacon and let it sort of permeate the pasta. So take this off the heat and add the pesto right in there. again, you know, with moderation because I don’t want to smother the pasta with the sauce. I just want the sauce to coat everything perfectly. And now that I have the pasta all coated with the pesto, going to add the cheese. All right, it’s time to plate the pasta. So, I always like to kind of spoon my pasta into the serving vessel. Just like that. [Music] And of course, I have a little bit for Lydia. Just a little bit of cheese on top. Just like that. And here we are. Simple, delicious, nutritious. And let me taste it. The pasta is nice. Valente. I can feel it under my fork. Complex in its simplicity is quite complex in flavor. You have the bacon, you have the the cabalonero, the garlic, the pepperoncino, the cheese. Everything comes into harmony. So going to finish this and then I’m going to show you another pasta. Fuzili compesto de pomodoro. It’s one of those recipes that are really simple, fresh, full of flavor, especially if you make it in the summer. And you don’t need to fuss with a long sauce. All you need to do is get some nice ripe tomatoes, slice them, cut them like that, and you slaughter them with a little bit of tomato paste that really intensifies and especially once it’s baked. Some onions, slice thick like that. Season it with salt and oil and you put it in the oven. And when they kind of get this color and kind of fall apart, they’re ready for the sauce. Just take them right off. Now you can see that this is this could be delicious just eating like that with some bread as a brusketa. And that’s another idea. Okay, the fusili is cooking already. and kind of roughly chop it up. So, because this is what we’ll we’ll toss the fusili with this. [Music] I like it chunky. You can make it thinner, but I I like it nice and chunky. A nice bowl to toss it with these luscious tomatoes and onions. M. Let’s check on the filli. Okay, a few more minutes. And again, you know, cook pasta just in salted water. No oil, no none of that stuff. We’ll let that do a little bit, a few more minutes. And I have a question. I love it when you ask me questions, especially pasta. You know, it’s so simple, but it has a lot of little details that once you know it, then you’re the master of the pasta kitchen. And this is from Elizabeth Krail from New York, and she wants to know which pasta go best with which sauces. I heard certain shapes hold different textures better. You’re right, Elizabeth. You know, it it is different textures. That’s why there are more than 1,200 different shapes of pasta. For this case, the fusili, you know, it’s like a spring. Uh the fusili looks like like a little spring like that. And I can see how this little pieces of onion or something will get kind of caught hooked up in those spiral kind of nooks and crannies of the fusili. So if you have a sauce like a bologn that’s a little chunky and whatever you want the pasta I think that has little holes or something. So riatoni uh uh ziti pen will go good uh where things will will lodge in um different like an oilbased sauce clam sauce or garlic sauce. I love spaghetti. I love long flat pasta and so on down the line. You play with the texture of the pasta and the sauces. Which pasta carries best your sauce to your mouth? That’s the object there. So, let’s fish out the pasta. And you know, I can’t repeat enough, do not rinse your pasta. Fish it out like that. Always save a little bit of pasta water. And let’s toss. And you know, this is kind of a traditional onions and and tomatoes, but you can see if you have some nice zucchini, you put some zucchini to roast, they would go great in here. You have some broccoli you’d like to roast. Absolutely. So, it looks nice and shiny, but I do want a little bit of fresh oil and uh basil. And I just like to rip basil. And basil you put in the last minute when you’re ready to serve the pasta. Uh because the heat of the pasta will wilt the basil and turn it black. So the last minute just before it goes on the table is the best. Some grated cheese just like that. Okay, I think I am ready to serve. Nice warm plates. And [Music] that looks good. Ricot salata. Ricot. You all know what it is. It’s ricott. When they make too much ricot, they used to drain it, put it in a container, and let it drain with a little bit of salt. So the salt will pull out the extra water. The ricott will condense and will become a nice kind of semi dry but still mellow like ricott is. And you can just grade it like that or you can grate it with a regular grater. And I kind of like it just like that. And that kind of gets mellow. The flavor comes out a little bit more of basil. See, I’m thinking where am I going to put this basil? You would put it something like that. But otherwise, you can just shred it on top. And I think that looks good. I’m going to take a little bit here. Where’s my tomatoes and onions? Uhhuh. And put a little bit of the ricott salata for me. Okay, that’s enough. And let me taste a little bit of basil. I need a little basil. Let me taste. Delicious. Fresh and kind of very light. The sweetness of the onions, the acidity of the tomatoes, but still sweet. The complex of the cheese and the basil. Magnificent. Confinocio butterfly. That’s that wonderful kind of bow tie pasta that everybody loves. And fennel, uh, you buy the whole fennel head with the fonds. It’s It’s the best because you know that it’s fresh. And you just cut off the fonts. And if there’s any this one, I guess that’s it. You pull it out like that. You cut it. And then you have the water for the pasta boiling. You throw the whole head right into the pasta water. So once it’s cooked, you plucked it out of the pasta water. You quarter it and cut it and it will become like this. You see? Nice and mellow and ready to to sauté with your pasta. Now the fans, I use the fonds also as well. I save it. I save it for soups. I save it for many things. But in this case, I’ll use it like you use parsley. You know, just kind of you just pull it off like that. You see, I love fennel. Next, we put the pasta in because by the time the pasta will cook, we will have our sauce done. Shrimp, it takes a few minutes to cook, but I like to give them a little flavoring. So, it’s the first thing that I kind of sear off in a little bit of oil, few slices of garlic just to flavor the shrimp. So, you know, there’s a saying in Italian pasta. Now, we eat the pasta. Now the real thing is happening. It is pasta time. But it’s an occasion for me to also teach you some few words, Italian words. You know, uh you ask me uh that I share with you the Italian language. So means now I go home. Mjamo, you know, the verb to eat. So mjamojamo and of course you know la pasta. So, pasta means like beckoning everybody to the table. Let’s go and eat. It’s time. This is it. Okay. So, the oil is nice and hot. Uh, make sure that the shrimps when you do that, you know, you wash them, you clean them, but make sure that they’re dry, that they’re drained well. And you want, especially if you want to sear them, you know, a nice wide pan so that the the shrimp don’t stick. And that’s browning. Let’s me chop the fonds. So, I’ll have that ready. Just like parsley. [Music] Let me chop the fennel. You’re trying to kind of make everything about the same size. So as you’re eating and fishing with the fork that you get uh the same kind of pieces in your mouth. So I’m thinking about we could do it this way. Yeah. Okay. Let’s do it this way. So this is the fennel and you know we’re talking about pasta and certainly we’ve done enough of the traditional pastas so there’s many ways of enjoying pasta making it lighter refreshing it in a sense just like this okay so I’m going to this is enough for me cooked enough just like that. And I’m going to add it just the last minute to the sauce. All of this is is good stuff that we are going to ultimately make the sauce out of. Some butter right in there. Some more garlic. And I’m going to crush the garlic. So this way I can pluck it out. Just like that. A little bit more oil. [Music] Let’s put in the leaks. And I, you know, I like using the green, light green leaves inside are great for for cooking. So use them. Don’t just use the white part of the leaves. [Music] the preparino and let’s put in the fennel. Usually, you know, pasta was a filler. You ate a nice big bowl of pasta with tomato, you were filled. It was delicious. But now it’s about, you know, balancing that filling act, not all starches. So, think about your uh pasta plate having one/ird of the vegetables, one/ird of the proteins, and one/ird of the pasta. So, you still get the satisfaction, the deliciousness of pasta, which everybody loves. And nutritionally, it makes sense. And uh use the seasonal vegetables. Nice and fresh seasonal vegetables are the best. So, here we’re cooking away. I’m looking. I like that caramelization going on. I’m going to delaze all of this with a little bit of wine. What you want from wine certainly is not the alcohol. The alcohol dissipates while you’re cooking, but you want the acidity and the uh flavor of the wine that you’re putting in. And you know, having a nice little glass of wine while you’re cooking could be a nice setting. So here everything is delazing all of this. And you know that I always tell you that to make the sauce, use the water from the pasta cooking. You know, could you use stock? Yes, but you don’t need to complicate things. Simple things. You have enough layers of flavors here. Let all this kind of cook just like that. So, the pasta is is al dente, and I want it a little al dente. I’m going to put it right in here and finish cooking right in there. Do not rinse the pasta. You can drain it, but do not rinse it. Uh, I think this gadget here, the spider, is an ideal gadget to fish out pasta, uh, especially shortcut pasta right out of the cooking water. And we are going to finish cooking it right here. So it will absorb the cooking liquid. This point I’ll throw in the fans. And you can see this is a really light pasta in a sense of uh you know the ingredients. Fennel and salmon goes great. So you can saute some salmon, chunks of salmon, add it or any fish. Uh fennel and chicken also goes goes well. So you can just, you know, I give you this recipe kind of show you the way, but I always tell you, you know, you can do it your way. So here we are. Let me add the shrimps now in there. Get the juice and everything. Just add it right in there like that. I think we are just about there. The pasta absorbed all of the sauce. It is cooked perfectly. Let me plate it. A nice warm plate. For pasta, you always want a nice warm plate. And you know, I like to ladle my pasta or spoon my pasta, if you will, rather than just empty it from the pan because, you know, all the sauce will pour out first. And uh I want to sort of top it off with the sauce. Oh, the shrimp seems to be still alive. It’s going all over the place. Okay. And I’m going to make myself a little plate [Music] profumo. and pour myself a glass of svenong. And you know when I when I do these things, uh I don’t know if it happens to you, but somehow every ingredient kind of in my mind begins to develop the flavors. So I have it in my mind all the flavors here the way I remember them, envision them before I even eat. So I look forward to kind of matching my mental vision to the reality that I have in front of me. So let’s shrimp the farale [Music] delicious. It’s quite quite mellow. The freshness of the fennel, of course, the hardiness of the pasta, the the love that comes with pasta. So, it’s it’s a nice mellow blend, but very gratifying. Certainly, I have enough. I have seconds, and I’m really looking to finish this. But before I do that, I’m going to invite you. So, come come and join me. [Music]