Authentic Italian Cooking
Italian Xmas recipes: pasta with meat sauce
A tasty pasta dish is traditionally included in the holiday menus in Italy. Generally it is seafood pasta on Christmas Eve and meat pasta in the other days. This is the page for classical and new recipes with tagliatelle, lasagna, ravioli, agnolotti and short pasta.
In Italy we have a lot of ideas to serve pasta on Holiday season and remember: it is not said you have to use expensive ingredients. The tastiest dishes of Italian tradition belong to poor cuisine. The simpliest you cook, the best your recipe will be ;))
Another important point is the way to serve, especially if you have guests.
The pasta, even the simpliest, is enhanced if it is served on a base of shortcrust or puff pastry.
You can also play on the arrangement of stuffed pasta in the pan like I did with the baked pasta you can see in the photo.
A final recommendation: be careful with pasta dish, it must match well with all the menu. In fact if you start with a very tasty appetizer, you can not serve a delicate pasta recipe. You couldn't enjoy its flavor ;))
Holiday season pasta recipe ideas, Italian style
I begin to talk about agnolotti with my home version, learned from my mother from Piedmont. A filling made with meat, ham, Parmesan cheese, spinach and egg yolk with a dash of Marsala.
And I continue to talk about traditional Piedmontese agnolotti with its authentic recipe. This kind of pasta is stuffed with escarole, sausage, cooked meats and brain.
In any case, this recipe and the version above are to be served with melted butter and sage, butter and Parmesan cheese, gravy or butter and slices of truffle.
This is the most modern version in which the stuffing is made with cheese added to the meat. So you can cook and serve them in broth or dress with meat sauce.
A tasty sauce with mushrooms and chicken livers for one of the best Italian pasta recipe.
To be made with fresh or dried pasta.
This sauce can be prepared in advance, perfect for your Christmas dinner. In this case choose fresh pasta that cooks quickly.
The most traditional Italian lasagna that follows a recipe of my family. It has already passed the test of three generations ;)) Made the day before this dish gets more flavor, so it is a perfect choice when you have to plan an elaborated menu. It's enough to serve a little piece of it if you have a lot of courses in your menu.
Orecchiette with horse meatballs
This is a great dish of Apulian cuisine. It tastes fantastic! I like it if combined with braised meat served after.
If you like game meat, this is the right dish for you at Christmas. Easy to do, you can prepare pasta sauce in advance and then cook egg pasta at the last moment.
Paccheri is a kind of pasta special to be filled. I prepared three stuffings with colors that remind Christmas and our flag!
Penne dressed with pot roast beef gravy
This pasta is an authentic Italian recipe. A very smart dish You cook pot roast beef and dress pasta with its gravy. It tastes fantastic and you work less ;))
Ravioli filled with radicchio and sausage
Here are the doses to make about 80 ravioli. You can easily prepare them the day before and serve dressed with a light sauce because if your ravioli are done well, with a definite flavor in their filling, you do not cover it with a full-bodied sauce.
What about lamb and artichokes? rabbit and red onion jam? chicken breast cooked in orange juice?
All they taste fantastic!
Neapolitan rigatoni cooked in the oven
Mouth-watering, isn't it? You can prepare it in advance and then bake just before serving. Authentic Italian baked pasta.
Lasagna with ricotta cheese, mushrooms, culatello ham and pumpkin. A recipe of mine that is mouth-watring ;)
In Italian it is called timpano di maccheroni. It is an elaborated, long to do recipe but you can't miss it if you want to serve something special from Naples!
Autore: Loretta Sebastiani
Google+ | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest