need help cooking a nice italian dinner
 

Any fairly easy recipes for success? I'm cooking one for my girlfriend tonight. I dont want to cook spaghetti or macaroni...something a little more advanced.

make some baked ziti

any specific recipe?

Baked Ziti
1 lb. sausage (or hamburger)
1 (15 oz.) jar spaghetti sauce
8 oz. ziti noodles (cooked and drained)
1/3 c. grated Parmesan cheese
1 (8 oz.) pkg. shredded Mozzarella cheese
Brown sausage and drain.
Cook noodles and drain
In a quart casserole dish combine sausage, sauce, noodles, Parmesan cheese and 1/2 of Mozzarella cheese.
Mix well.
Top with remaining cheese.
Bake 25 minutes at 350 degrees.

Easy and tastes good

Easy Mac, thats awesome man. Thanks for the recipe. That sounds like something that even I can cook :)

Well, I screwed it up a little the first time, but the second time was excellent (I don't think I had quite the right consistency of ingredients, a little too cheesy for my tastes), but I can barely cook chilli out of a can, so as long as your more advanced than that, you're fine.

I like manicotti. It's time consuming but great.

Manicotti
This recipe comes from Chef Paolo's wife Frances who is an excellent cook in her own right. The crepes can be made a few days ahead of time and kept refrigerated.

Serves 6

For the crepes:
8 eggs
1 cup milk
1 cup water
2 cups flour
makes 24 to 30 crepes

For the filling:
3 pound can of ricotta cheese
1/4 cup grated parmagianno cheese
3 eggs
1/2 pound mozzarella cheese, cut into small cubes

To complete the dish:
3 cups Marinara Sauce
1/4 cup parmagianno cheese

1. Mix the ingredients for the crepes in a large bowl until smooth. Allow batter to rest for 10 minutes.
2. Put a drop of oil in a 7 inch teflon coated frying pan, and rub oil with a paper towel over bottom of pan to coat. Heat pan over medium heat.
3. Pour 1/4 cup of batter into pan, tilting until bottom of pan is coated. Cook one minute on each side, do no allow to get too brown. Repeat until all batter is used.
4. Mix together ingredients for the filling in a large bowl.
5. Place 2 heaping tablespoons of the filling down the center of each crepe. Fold the two opposite ends of the crepe over the filling loosely to make a tube.
6. Coat the bottom of a large baking dish with 1 cup of the marinara sauce and place the manicotti in the dish.
7. Cover with remaining marinara and 1/4 cup parmagianno cheese.
8. Bake in a preheated oven at 350 degrees until hot all the way through 10-15 minutes.

Make sure when you cover the manicotti with the sauce, that you try to get it all covered. Otherwise, the manicotti can dry out in the oven.

for the marina sauce, you can find a recipe to make it homemade, or get some of the ragu pasta sauce...

this thread is making me hungry

A supremely easy baked pasta recipe (different from the previous one in that you don't have to pre-cook the noodles!):

Ingredients:
1 lb. ground beef, turkey, or chicken
1 16 oz. (1 lb.) box ziti or elbow macaroni
1 15 or 16 oz. jar sauce
1 onion, chopped
chopped celery if desired
2 cups Mozarella cheese (or Italian blend)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 425 F
Brown the meat. Add onions (and celery if used) and continue cooking until onions are soft and meat is fully cooked.
In 9" x 13" pan, mix pasta (UNCOOKED), meat mixture, and sauce. Add 1 jar of water to mixture (i.e. once you've poured in the sauce, refill the jar with water and pour that in). Mix well so all pasta is covered and evenly distributed.
Cover with aluminum foil and bake in oven for 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes, take out of oven, remove foil, and mix well. Spread it back out and cover the top with the mozarella/Italian blend (you can use more than 2 cups if you like cheese).
Put back into the oven UNCOVERED for 10 minutes (until cheese melts).
Usually it helps to let it cool for a few minutes to let things set. Either way, a killer meal. Toss a salad on the side, and dig in :)

EDIT: tk's note: this is the more or less the SAME recipe you find on the back of the Prego "Pasta Bake" special sauces (I added ground meat and onions and celery). It turns out that those special "Pasta Bake" sauces, they usually charge you a buck or two extra for and there's no appreciable difference between the "special" sauce and the "regular" sauce.

/tk

Thanks alot guys, you have all helped a lot. I'll definetely be cooking all of these sometime in the near future.

I may need to go to OG for dinner tonight.

Paging Jeeber

Just make sure you name all three recipes after the forum menbers who proposed them, so you can tell the girlfriend you're making that sophisticated Italian dish, Easy Mac.

the only problem I have with baked ziti, is it is very much like spaghetti. Nothing wrong with that of course, but he did mention he wanted something other than spagetti...

I worked this morning. You missed out... ;)

Cook some Chicken Marsala, yo...

One of these days, I'm going to come down to DFW area and eat at the Olive Garden you work at, so I can harrass you the entire time. Of course, I'll leave a good tip afterwards. :p

That would be awesome...and then we can go grab a beer. :)

If you and the lil' lady don't have an aversion to veal, then saltimbocca is an excellent, easy to prepare meal. You could even subsititute pork for the veal, but it's not quite the same. It's more of a Roman dish than Italian, but I really liked eating them when I lived over there. Another dish, which is a little more complicated, is cottoletto. It's kind of like a chicken-fried steak without the cream gravy. In Germany they call it Weinerschnitzel.

mmmmn. this is making me crave me some veal osso bucco!

I'm moving back to NJ Aug. 31st.

We are gonna have to go grab a beer.

How'd your dinner go, cody?
As to Airhog's (?) comment about pasta bake not being as elegant as other dishes...true, it's not. :) Though it is more "work" than simple pasta and sauce, and usually people tend to think you've spent longer on it than you did. Heck, even my mom, who I learned MOST of my cooking prowess from, keeps asking me for the recipe for "that wonderful pasta bake" I make. :D Let me tell you, that makes my day...if only she knew...

/tk

Yup.

The dinner went great guys. The girlfriend loved the pasta bake that you (terpkristin) suggested. Thanks again for the recipes and the suggestions.

did you pork her, russ?