Pasta

This summery pasta is just as much about the vegetables as it is about the pasta itself. The star of the dish is the roasted eggplant, which caramelizes and softens in the oven. Those tender browned cubes then get tossed with cooked pasta and a quickly made sauce of fresh grated tomatoes, capers and chile flakes. Because the tomatoes need to be ripe and soft enough to fall into a purée when you rub the cut sides over the holes of a grater, heirloom tomatoes (which haven’t been bred for sturdiness during shipping) are a good choice here. But any juicy, flavorful, fleshy tomatoes will work.

To achieve a sauce for our penne alla vodka recipe with the right balance of sweet, tangy, spicy, and creamy, we pureed half the tomatoes (which helped the sauce cling nicely to the pasta) and cut the rest into chunks. For sweetness, we added sautéed minced onions. We found we needed a liberal amount of vodka to cut through the richness and add zing to the sauce, but we had to add it to the tomatoes early on to allow the alcohol to mostly (but not completely) cook off and prevent a boozy flavor.

Yogurt in pasta sauce may be unexpected but it imparts a nice creaminess — and a bit of a tang — missing in more heavy, traditional dairy-based sauces. In Morocco, fresh peas were abundant. As I like to load up with a lot of green vegetables whenever possible, adding zucchini and spinach to this dish felt exactly right. Serving with extra Parmesan cheese is a must.

Pasta and a glass of wine are a natural pairing, but we were intrigued by the idea of spaghetti al vino rosso—a legendary dish in which pasta is actually cooked in red wine. The few recipes that exist fall into two categories: those in which a full bottle of wine is reduced to a glaze and then used to coat a pound of fully cooked spaghetti, and those in which parcooked spaghetti is finished in wine, risotto-style.

Lunchtime is around the corner, and your tummy is rumbling. If you've got a microwave, a mug and a few basic ingredients, you can cook up a meal right in the office.

Morning Edition's David Greene recently started microwaving scrambled eggs in a mug for those early mornings on hosting duties. It led him to wonder about the other possibilities of this culinary art.

 I found the recipe upon which this is based in Clifford A. Wright’s first cookbook, “Cucina Paradiso: The Heavenly Food of Sicily.” And it is heavenly. I love the way raisins or currants and saffron introduce a sweet element into the savory and salty mix.

Tossing hot pasta with ricotta cheese creates a quick, creamy sauce that's rich in taste and low in fat. Top this dish with fresh parsley or basil, if you have some on hand.

For the perfect amount of lemon flavor in our Spaghetti with Lemon and Olive Oil recipe, we mitigated the fresh lemon juice and lemon zest with cream. Using equal amounts cream and olive oil kept our recipe’s sauce creamy and fruity. To get the sauce to cling to the pasta, we let the sauced pasta sit covered for a few minutes to allow the pasta to absorb the flavors and the sauce to thicken.  

We wanted to create a whole wheat pasta sauce recipe that would provide just the right complement to the hearty flavor and firm texture of whole-wheat spaghetti. We found that a boldly flavored sauce made with sun-dried tomatoes and sautéed zucchini provides a nice counterpoint to the whole-wheat pasta’s hearty texture. Starch from some added pasta liquid thickens the sauce and helps it cling to the spaghetti. A sprinkling of freshly grated Pecorino Romano, which our tasters preferred to the more subtle Parmesan, adds a salty tang to a simply sauced whole-wheat spaghetti recipe.