I've been cutting down on carbs lately and looking for an excuse to have a big plate of spaghetti topped with sauce and grated parmesan cheese. Hello National Pasta Day!

I could spend the entire day just doing posts for pasta, it's such a versatile food, but I can't do that. Instead, here are several pasta recipes from various sites, including Epicurious, AllRecipes, RecipeZaar, Food Network, The Reluctant Gourmet and The National Pasta Association.

And don't forget the sauce! Here are several recipes from About.com and this one from MealsMatter.org for Southwestern Pasta Sauce.

• This is not your father's lasagna.
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• Sausages in Blankets, made with chicken and turkey sausage.
• It's almost Easter, and that means it's time for chocolate (personally, I think it's always time for chocolate).
• The easiest dinner imaginable involves chicken, tomatoes, onions and a big pot.
• This week's recipes: Poor Man's Pudding, Bellybuttons, Creamy Shad Roe with Grits and Frog In A Bog Muffins.

As I said yesterday in my post about the ham and cheese pasta bake, there are few things more comforting than a baked pasta dish. This Polenta Lasagna with Portabellas and Kale is a nice illustration of this point, although it doesn't quite use pasta, substituting polenta for the more traditional noodles. It also shows that you don't need cheese to have satisfying comfort food because the dish, made by Susan from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, is completely dairy-free. The dish is made by first making the polenta, spreading it into a thin layer on a baking sheet and leaving it to set up in the fridge. Once it is firm, it can be easily sliced into noodle-like layers. The filling is made with garlic, kale, mushrooms, marinara sauce and "cheese" sauce, which uses ingredients like tofu, cashew butter and soy milk, as well as a number of spices and some corn starch, to add a creamy mouthfeel to the filling. If you're not vegan and don't want to go through the trouble, adding a bit of ricotta in place of the "cheese" sauce would make this a lovely vegetarian dinner.

Pasta is easy to cook. All you have to do is open up a bag and pour as much as you want into salted, boiling water, bring it back up to a boil and wait until it is done. The tricky thing about pasta is cooking it to the right consistency.

Al dente, a firm but not hard texture with a small amount of "bite," is usually what is desired and is rarely achieved by following the instructions on the packaging. A more reliable method of cooking pasta is to let it boil for several minutes and then testing pieces of pasta at 30-60 second intervals until you reach your preferred consistency. For this to work, however, you have to stand over the stove the whole time, so another option, this time in the form of a gadget, might present the perfect solution. The Pasta Per'fect Timer is dropped into the pot along with your noodles and changes color according to the level of doneness of the pasta. It gives three indicators, from thin (angel hair) to thick (lasagna noodles) and it will only take a couple of batches before you find exactly the right level of donrness and can hit it every time.

I always have the best plans around the holidays when it comes to food. I always have some mathmatical formula where I'm going to consume the least amount of calories possible. If I don't have any cookies, I can drink more. If I don't have any of my sister's brownies, I can have a third helping of stuffing.

It never works out though. I go back for seconds at my sister's house (ham, lasagna, chicken breasts, green bean casserole, various desserts), then have a turkey sandwich and stuffing later that night at home. I go to my other sister's Xmas Eve party and find myself eating pasta salad and grazing on tortilla chips, cheese, and trifle all night (and six beers - "light," but still). Then, on Xmas Day, another meal, this one consisting of turkey, oatmeal and sausage stuffing, yams with marshmallow topping, a bottle of wine, Oreo Cookie cake and cheesecake.

What did you have to eat the past few days?

Sometimes, when a particularly delicious piece of food porn seems to speak for itself, it is tempting just to post it without any caption. The problem is that it is not actually obvious as to what most foods are. For example, what appears to be a blueberry muffin could have a cream cheese filling, or a steak could have a spicy balsamic glaze. You wouldn't necessarily be able to get that information from a photograph alone, and when dishes look good enough to be food porn, it's only fair to mention a recipe or what goes into them so you can try it at home. This dish is a bowl of Lasagna Soup, cooked up by Joe, from Culinary in the Desert Country. It is an unexpected dish because you don't usually see lasagna in soup form, although once you've heard the name, the soup begins to look more and more like the real pasta dish, especially because of the curly-edged noodles in the bowl. The recipe comes from Cuisine at Home magazine and uses hot Italian sausage, spinach, tomatoes, pasta and lots of cheese for a satisfying, comforting meal.

There is no question about the fact that Alicat, at Something So Clever, takes great photographs of her food. More recently, she has started to add a faux polaroid effect to her shots, which definitely give her blog a unique look and add a really homemade feel to the photos and recipes - sort of like looking into a family recipe book. These Lasagna Rolls, which are from a Giada de Laurentiis recipe, look positively mouthwatering. They are filled with ricotta, prosciutto (both of which Giada puts into every single thing she makes, it seems) and parmesan cheese, then are topped with a generous amount of sauce and mozzarella. The beauty of the rolls is that each serving comes out of the pan very neatly. Whether you want to attempt to eat it neatly is entirely up to you. You can find the recipe here.