18 Great Italian Pastas

Here's a bonus recipe for your weeknight repertoire, Pasta with Baby Salisbury Steaks. It lets you get reacquainted with that kitchen workhorse, the broiler.

Buy a large bottle of kalamata olives and extra Asiago cheese (thanks to its firm to hard texture, it keeps longer than softer cheeses). Pair the two with a glass of wine and high-quality crackers, and you'll have a satisfying appetizer spread to come home to after one of those days. Italian sausage and kalamata olives are what give this dish an Italian flair. Use turkey sausage for a lower fat version of the recipe.

The Italian name for bow ties, farfalle (fahr-FAH-lay), means "butterflies." The shapely pasta comes in two sizes, the regular size shown here, and miniature bows. Gather any late-season sweet peppers from your garden or the farmer's market for this spicy dish.

Convenient purchased ravioli makes this an easy pasta meal to serve any day of the week. The ravioli soak up the juice from the cherry tomatoes as they cook, giving this one-pan dish maximum flavor with minimum cleanup.

Go Italian tonight. Buy a bag of ready-to-eat mixed salad greens or go by the salad bar at the grocery store and build a salad bowl for three. Round out the meal with a crisp green salad and crusty rolls.

Walk into your kitchen after work and have this crunchy chicken and pasta dish finished in about half an hour.

A creamy yogurt-mustard sauce tossed with green beans, bow-tie pasta, and pancetta make up this quick-to-fix pasta dish.

You'll have enough of the robust, meaty sauce for eight servings, or serve half of the sauce and freeze the other half for another meal.

Chicken livers work well for the quick-cooking technique of stir-frying.

Tomatoes and lima beans join with chicken breasts to make this stove top meal. Any width pasta will do here, but wider, ruffle-edge noodles, such as pappardelle or mafalda, create plenty of places for the sauce to cling. Any width pasta will do here, but wider, ruffle-edge noodles, such as pappardelle or mafalda, create plenty of places for the sauce to cling.

Layers of zesty-seasoned ground beef and tomatoes, tender pasta, and creamy ricotta cheese create a family-pleasing casserole. Only you need to know that this version is low-fat and provides generous amounts of both vitamin A and calcium.

We updated everyone's favorite pasta dish by using ground turkey instead of ground beef.

Whipping cream enriches this herbed tomato and meat sauce. Serve it over your favorite pasta.

For this robust lasagna-style entree, roll the noodles around a cheesy spinach filling and then top them with a turkey and tomato sauce.

By using lower-fat cheeses in this recipe, we slashed the fat per serving in half. This slimmer version also has 75 fewer calories than a standard lasagna recipe.

Bake these single-serving casseroles, topped with lots of melted cheese, for a hot and satisfying supper.

Broccoli and pimiento add vivid colors to the tasty chicken filling that spills from these pasta shells.

The older children can pitch in to help put this easy lasagna together for a family-style dinner.