Category Pasta Love

This is a quick pasta and shrimp dish that I whipped up last night for dinner. Corabella tortellini, shrimp, butter, lemon juice, and seasoning that you’ll find in your pantry are all you need for this dish. Plus the water to boil the tortellini of course.

This Shrimp & Penne W/ Lemon-Butter & Sour Cream Sauce is a variation of the Seafood Spaghetti except I’ve used just shrimp and penne for pasta, and added sour cream instead of grated Parmesan cheese. This variation could easily be added to the list of meatless dishes any day of the week.

After the hearty Christmas spread with all the yummy sides, then having leftovers for a couple of days, we’ve gone to a Mexican restaurant one night for dinner. Then we went grocery shopping to stock up the fridge. I was dying to bite into a seafood dish. I grabbed a pack of assorted seafood which has cuttlefish, shrimp, octopus, squid, and mussels. I thought it would be delicious with al dente spaghetti noodles, and butter-lemon sauce. I was right. This seafood spaghetti was easy and fast to make but soooo good.

When I make spaghetti meat sauce for a spaghetti dinner I always end up with more sauce than the noodles. Throughout the years I’ve always been making too much spaghetti that gives us leftovers for 2-3 days worth of lunch. Fortunately, I have learned to save spaghetti sauce for other pasta dishes for future dinners. Sometimes I just ladle them into a jar then store that in the fridge to use a few days later. For longer storage, it’s best to store the extra sauce in a ziploc bag, then into the freezer.

So to use up a bag of frozen spaghetti meat sauce, I decided to use it with Corabella’s Mezzaluna 4-Cheese Ravioli. To make the dish more exciting and filling, I also added ricotta cheese and shredded cheese before baking in the oven. This Baked Ravioli With Meat Sauce & Ricotta Cheese is almost like the Baked Potato Gnocchi W/ Spinach & Ricotta Cheese without the spinach.

Actually, that should say, we made homemade pasta and we LOVED it. Throughout the years I’ve always watched some TV chefs from various cooking shows  say that homemade pastas are really good. I’ve read the same thought from various cookbooks as well. So I’ve always wanted to try making my own pasta except I didn’t have a pasta maker. I have a Kitchen Aid but I don’t have the pasta maker attachment. I supposed I could’ve used the rolling pin to flatten the dough but using a pasta maker just looks so much fun. Well, that’s all changed now coz my mother-in-law just gave me a stand-in pasta maker. It’s the Atlas Marcato 150 Pasta Maker, plus an extra attatchment for papperdelle (lasagna) maker.

If you’ve noticed I said “WE made…”  The original plan was for my daughter and I to make homemade spaghetti noodles. She got so excited when I was making the dough coz she thought I was making sugar cookies. I told her I was making spaghetti instead. Forget the cookies coz she got even more excited upon hearing her favorite pasta dish of all time, bear in mind that she’s only turning 6 in a few days. This girl could eat spaghetti for breakfast, lunch, snack, or dinner. Kinda like pizza, hah. Then I took the pasta maker out of the box, oh boy was she excited. But then I had to ruin the excitement by explaining that we have to wait for 30 minutes to let the dough rest. So she spent every 5 minutes checking up on me and the kitchen until I finally said we could start making the spaghetti noodles.

Continuing on to the “we” part, it turns out, making homemade pasta is a fun family affair. A messy one that is. Thank goodness Daddy woke up from his nap to help us out.  I needed his help so badly, not just making the pasta but so I could somehow take pictures of the process to write about. I missed a couple of pictures because it was just too hard to do things all at once but hopefully I’ve covered most of the steps.

FYI, when you start making your own homemade pasta, make sure you have A LOT of flour. Not just for making the dough but also during the entire process of shaping the noodles. Flour is your bestfriend.

The way I made this Corabella Stuffed Tortellini With Meat Sauce is pretty much how I make spaghetti. The only difference, obviously, is the kind of pasta. I used Corabella’s stuffed tortellini instead of Angel Hair pasta or the regular spaghetti noodles.

This chicken and pasta salad would be a nice pasta salad to make use of whatever leftover chicken you’ve got in the fridge. Having said that though, I actually didn’t use leftover chicken here but I just want you to know that you could easily use leftovers. And this is just a different version of the other pasta salads I’ve made before. I just added chicken here and used raspberry vinaigrette instead of Italian dressing. And of course, different pasta.

Summer means a lot of things. One of them is making cold pasta salads. I suppose it’s ok to make them during winter too but it is usually during the Summer that I get to indulge in whipping up different kinds of cold pasta salads. They’d go with any grilled meat entrees, including kebabs, satays, burgers, just to name a couple. Pasta salads prefect to serve as side dishes during the summer parties in the backyard or as lunch for the family on regular days. This Mini Rotelle Cold Pasta Salad W/ Cheese & Sunflower Seeds is basically another version of Pasta & Broccoli Salad W/ Golden Raisins and Sunflower Seeds but without the golden raisins and chopped fresh broccoli. I added chopped eggs instead.