A lot of our food traditions and habits we learn from our parents at an early age. Take pasta sauce. I come from a large Italian family, so we had spaghetti every single week when I was growing up. My mom made her sauce (my dad's recipe, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it was award-winning) and when we put it on the pasta, we put a lot. Not enough so it gets all watery and the pasta is swimming, but certainly enough to cover the pasta out to the edge (more than the photo above).

Now here comes Mark Bittman at The New York Times who agrees with this approach. While most cookbooks will tell you to make a lot of pasta and just add a couple of ladels of sauce in the middle of the plate, Bittman suggests you turn the amounts around and make twice as much sauce as pasta. Mario Batali, in a video from Serious Eats after the jump, disagrees.

How do you sauce your pasta?

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.

Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. I like my local Applebee's, but not for the food. I've been there hundreds of times, yet I can count the number of meals I've eaten there on one hand. With the sole exception of the burger, I usually regret ordering anything there.

The real reason I go is simple: there are hardly any watering holes in Rego Park, Queens. Lest any of my fellow Slashfoodies, or God forbid my legions of fans, think me anything less than hip for bending my elbow at a chain restaurant, please be aware that such celebs as Joey Ramone's mother have been known to eat at the very same place. Really, it's true she hails from nearby Forest Hills.

So it certainly wasn't the Huge Flavor campaign involving Food Network star Tyler Florence that drew me to Applebee's last month. Although I must admit that that hearing that two dear friends of mine had sampled some items from the new menu sparked a torrent of conflicting emotions: sympathy, jealousy, Schadenfreude, and a sense of professional envy. Hovering above all of this was a lingering dread, since as a fellow gourmand and food writer I knew I would have to take one for the team.

Sales of long pasta like spaghetti and linguini are down at Tesco, the UK's top grocery chain. The decline in popularity comes from young diners opting for shorter pasta because they can't eat the long strands without getting sauce all over themselves, Tesco says. Not surprisingly, demand for short pasta like penne and has gone up. "Unfortunately some younger British diners appear to lack the same culinary skills that their parents have which is why we've had to tailor our new range accordingly," a Tesco spokesperson told Food Business Review.