Pasta with garlic, anchovies, capers. Photo: Fotoos Van Robin, Flickr

• How to make a satisfying pasta dish in the time it takes to boil the water.
• Adam Ried, who penned new cookbook "Thoroughly Modern Milkshakes," suggests using everything from herbs and spices and flavored oils to a wider range of dairy products in modern milkshake concoctions.
• Desperation Dinners feeds Labor Day partiers with a go-to sandwich on a roll.
• Boteco Brasilian Bar boasts good eats and an overflowing house of chattering patrons.
• Preparing Russian potato salad Olivier-style with beets and cold meats.
• Miami's food and wine calendar.

Everyone loves pasta. To satisfy your pasta cravings and find the best pasta, take this pasta shape identification quiz from Slashfood.

Pasta with zucchini, goat cheese and lemon. Photo: sassyradish, Flickr.

A pasta dinner is what you make of it. A heavy-handed helping layered with too much sauce and cheese can leave a gal feeling lethargic. But when prepared with colorful, seasonal ingredients like zucchini, goat cheese and lemon, it makes for a light, savory summer supper.

Adapted from a recipe in the June issue of Bon Appetit, this beautiful bowlful of fresh fettuccine was tossed with a sauce made of green zucchini, yellow summer squash, olive oil, shallots, garlic, goat cheese, lemon and herbes de Provence. It's topped with what appears to be the only thing that could make it more summery than it already is: chiffonade of basil.

As one commenter on the photographer's Flickr page said, "It's possible that you just captured summer in a bowl." Agreed!

[Via Flickr]

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Mint is prized throughout the Mediterranean, used in honeyed desserts, sprinkled liberally on savory dishes and used to brew the sweetest tea. In Morocco, it's even used as an air freshener as locals stroll through the streets of the market place and stuff leaves unto their nostrils to block out strong odors.

One of my favorite Mediterranean flavor combos is mint and tomato, tossed together in a light, savory sauce for summer. I think most Americans might think basil is the end all when it comes to tomato sauce, but in Southern Italian cooking mint is used liberally. I remember cooking swordfish in a fish basics class in culinary school. It had a perky tomato sauce with paper-thin slices of garlic, 'GoodFellas' style. We added a big fresh bunch of mint, chopped, to a sauce that had bubbling hot cherry tomatoes popping open in the skillet.

Get Jennifer's recipe for Spaghetti with Mint Leaves after the jump.

Ever since an ethereal-sounding "daffodil" pasta stuffed with pear and four cheeses was featured in The New York Times last week we have been captive to a one-track mind: "Must create creamy cheese pouches in velvety sauce without making trip across town to specialty shop."

You can't always get what you want, as the song goes, but you sure can get close. With this writer's blurb as a guide, it was off to the local grocer in hopes of creating a dish that would ease our itch for rich, blooming pasta. The basics were easy -- cheese tortellini, cream and a sprightly marriage of pears, fresh mint and tangy lemon zest. Next up: cheeses to add depth while coating the tortellini with a creamy sheen. After considering mild Robiola and punchy Cashel Blue, we settled on nutty hard Gruyère and stinky, meltingly soft aged Taleggio.

The results and the recipe after the jump.

Fresh pasta: Every time we see it, it stops us short. Maybe it's the familiar sight of noodles after a long haul of a day. Maybe it's the swirl of tomatoes and poppy fresh fava beans, or the thought of irresistibly salty chopped sausage. Regardless, something about this Smitten Kitchen photo made us pause, mid-Web-surf, and for good reason: A quick investigation reveals that the smitten couple is actually moving and this is the last meal in their beloved old 80-square-foot kitchen. So click on over, bid them adieu as they settle into their new digs, or just sort of hang out and ponder the beauty of fresh pasta and tomatoes for a while. We won't judge.

[Via Smitten Kitchen]

The Atlantic has an interesting piece up about a writer's newfound obsession with imported whole-wheat pasta. Though he'd never been a fan before sampling the Morelli family's toothsome noodles, now he's sold.

Among the interesting tidbits we gleaned: A century ago, before milling techniques evolved to enable refining of the wheat germ, folks were primarily eating whole wheat pasta. Maybe they were in better health too.

Whole-wheat pasta is supposed to be a relatively good-for-you carb. If our trusty copy of "The Food Lover's Companion" is to be believed, imported dried pasta is also considered superior, taste-wise, to its domestic counterpart. So we're going to look up these here Morellis.

Have you ever tried whole-wheat pasta? What'd you think?

If you want to get into pasta making but don't want to pay for a machine or go through the effort of rolling it out by hand, there is an alternative: gnocchi.

In the above clip, Giorgio Locatelli whips up some rather tasty looking gnocchi from scratch. There's no bowl involved in this method -- just the old-school ring on the countertop with the egg in the middle. What's particularly interesting is his insistence on boiling the potatoes with the skin on -- not something you see with other gnocchi techniques out there.

He might have a tendency to lick his fingers and not wash them, but methinks the recipe will do just as well without that added touch.

By the time McDonald's introduced Happy Meals, I was too old to enjoy them. I've always felt kind of gypped by the whole Happy Meal thing. Now that the fast-food giant may discontinue the Pasta Zoo Happy Meal in its Australian restaurants, I'm even more disappointed. Actually that's a lie, I've never even heard of Pasta Zoo until today. It sounds like the pasta version of animal crackers.

Pasta Zoo was introduced back in January, but after poor sales, McDonald's is seriously considering replacing it with something else. The animal-shaped pasta with dipping sauce was part of the company's efforts to provide healthier Happy Meals.

This isn't the first failed product for Macca's, as the chain is known Down Under. Last spring the chain tested several dinner items, including spaghetti Bolognese and beef rendang, that were dropped from the menu. As a fan of Malaysian food, I don't whether to be happy or disappointed that one can no longer get a Big Mac with a side order of rendang in Australia.

I've always loved the little Turkish lamb dumplings called manti, so I was psyched to see this New York Times story on how to make manti the easy way. Instead of hand-rolling and filling pasta dough, a delicate and time-consuming process, the author tosses sauteed lamb with pre-made bowtie pasta, yogurt, roasted eggplant, red-pepper-infused browned butter, garlic and mint. Yum.

You can deconstruct all kinds of complicated pasta dishes. I like taking the flavors from my favorite butternut squash ravioli and letting it all hang out, tossing together sauteed squash cubes, orcchiette, sage, brown butter and Parmesan. Oprah's got a similar recipe.

Food manufacturers are always looking for ways to improve the nutritional content of their products, as well as ways to lower the calories. Scientists may have found a new way to do just that with an innovative new ingredient: banana flour.

They've developed a flour from unripe bananas, and adding it to pasta has been one of the first applications. Pasta makers have experimented with adding other ingredients, but everything they've tried so far makes the pasta shrink too much when it's cooked. Banana flour, on the other hand, doesn't seem to cause any additional shrinkage.

The banana flour looks promising for manufacturers. Not only does the new flour add antioxidants and tannins for a nutritional boost, it also boosts the amount of resistant starch by 12%. That allows the potential pasta to claim to be a lower glycemic index food because the resistant starch is not digestible and works in your system like insoluble fiber.

The pasta makers say that the results they've gotten with the banana flour yield a good quality product but that more testing is required regarding the taste of the product. So you may see banana flour as an ingredient in the future, but it may take a while for it to get there.

Tired of boring pastas with just one sauce? Add another, or two!

Opening up a box of pasta usually isn't a sensory experience, save for the sound of cardboard ripping, or noodles splashing into some boiling water. Heck, even homemade pasta can seem surprisingly bland, even if its made with a myriad of flavorful ingredients. For the most part, it just offers a nice, rich color. But then there is egg pasta, the classic.

For some reason, my forays into pasta didn't start with the egg variety. I started with whole grain and spinach, moved onto beet and plain flour with water varieties, and came late to the egg pasta game. No kitchen hardware was used -- just a ring of flour and some hand-kneaded pasta. (My first time, I didn't make the ring large enough, the egg started spilling over, hence the lack of a nice ring in the picture above.)

It was the best looking dough I ever made, and I sectioned some for fresh pasta, and some to be dried. This is where the magic comes in. The dried pasta has an insanely delicious and warm smell to it, similar to an Italian cookie. It's quickly become one of my favorite foodie smells, ranked with the likes of coffee roasting and bacon frying. It's also the perfect homemade food to give as gifts -- nestled in a basket with some jars of sauce, antipaste, and dried mushrooms, the pasta will give off a surprising and welcome aroma when it hits the air and the recipient's nose.

Try it for yourself. It's amazing such a great smell can come from something so simple.

The short answer is that durum flour is flour which is ground from Durum wheat. Durum wheat is a type of wheat that has an especially high protein content, and in fact its name derives from the Latin word for "hard".

Durum flour, with its high protein content, makes dough with unusually strong gluten. It's generally used in pizza dough and pasta, and its more coarsely ground cousin semolina is used to make cous cous. Though you can make bread with durum flour, recipes usually mix durum and regular wheat flour.

Durum wheat can be ground into semolina (sometimes called semolina flour if it's ground more finely) and durum flour, which can be referred to as extra fancy durum flour or extra fancy pasta flour. However, you can't really substitute one for the other. Semolina is a coarse grind and it looks a lot like corn meal. In fact a lot of bakers and pizza makers use semolina to dust baking sheets and peels so the dough doesn't stick (check the bottom of your pizza next time). Durum flour is ground as fine as regular flour and that's why it can be used in bread and pasta doughs.

I haven't ever been able to find real durum flour in a brick and mortar store, so I have to order it online. Semolina, on the other hand, is generally available in grocery stores, at least upscale ones. For more on the subject, here's a good page to check out.

Kimberly of Adventures in Eating Locally has been taunting me for months with this dark chocolate linguine that she purchased from Pappardelle's Pasta at a farmer's market. Not only did the concept of dark chocolate linguine sound absolutely amazing to me, but she promised to use a recipe found on Pappardelle's website for a dark chocolate kugel - be still my heart!

I finally got the dinner invite last week and nothing was going to stop me from going. I, of course, had to try some of the uncooked pasta. I couldn't wait! It tasted like normal uncooked pasta but with a slight chocolate flavor. After it was cooked, the chocolate flavor was even more mild. Don't expect this pasta to taste like a chocolate bar. It is still pasta.

The kugel itself was worth the anticipation. It didn't much taste like chocolate, but the chocolate essence was there just enough to make it extra fun!

Chocolate or not, I was impressed with the quality of Pappardelle's Pasta. If it's not at a farmer's market near you, you can buy it online.