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.

I'm a big fan of pasta. I like the flexibility and options you have with it. I used to make this dish I liked to call "Rigatoni Sassone" (it's great when a food you love rhymes with your name). It was basically rigatoni mixed with various vegetables and then tossed with parmesan and cheddar cheese, served with rosemary and olive oil bread. It was cheap and easy, but I haven't had it in a while.

I thought of that after seeing this recipe on AOL Food (from allrecipes.com). I'm not a fan of vodka, though I guess it won't make that much of an impact, right?

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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.

Spaghetti is one of the trickier things to portion properly. It never looks like enough before it is cooked and is almost invariably more than you could, or should, eat at one sitting. A Swedish design company, Superdupia, has come up with a very creative way to get the proper portion sizes. Their Spaghetti Book is spiral-bound, made of plastic and full of holes. Each of the holes is measured to fit a specific amount of dry spaghetti (1 serving, 2 servings, etc), making it easy to get just the right amount every time you cook. It might also have some appeal for parents with small children, who can help "cook" by measuring out the pasta using the fun shapes.

The book is $21,

[via notcot]

The authors of On Top of Spaghetti...: ...Macaroni, Linguine, Penne, and Pasta of Every Kind own the restaurant Al Forno in Providence, RI, which specializes in exceptional pastas and Italian food. The book is a compilation of some of those pasta dishes from the restaurant alongside some at-home and after-hours favorites of the chefs - chefs who are definitely on top when it comes to making great spaghetti (linguini, etc.). There is a wealth of knowledge in the book that will benefit the home chef. For example, they go into great detail about how to tell when pasta is actually "al dente," since it is a mark that tends to be under- or overshot frequently. They also give detailed descriptions of common ingredients - from parmesan to prosciutto - how to use them and how to make sure you're getting the best. in some cases, the best way may be to make up a batch yourself. Case in point, there is a recipe for homemade ricotta cheese that is surprisingly accessible. In fact, all of the recipes are very approachable for the home chef, who will be helped along with lots of tips and flavor-boosting shortcuts that are sprinkled throughout. They will even be useful even if you want to improve a jarred sauce on a really busy weeknight. There are classic sauce+pasta combinations, as well as recipes for baked pasta dishes, such as Ricotta Ravioli, Saffron-Sauced Pasta and Osso Buco, Spaghetti with Fresh Spinach and Gorgonzola and Penne with Fresh Artichokes.

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Here's a bit of food trivia: The word "pomodoro" translates to "golden apple," reflecting that the first tomatoes were yellow, not red. It has been some time since anyone expected Pasta Pomodoro to be made with golden, not red tomatoes, and as Nosheteria proves with her beautiful rendition of the dish, red tomatoes make more of an impact when serving, anyway.

Her pasta pomodoro delivers perfectly cooked spaghetti topped with fresh basil, freshly shaved parmesan cheese and a "double whammy in the tomato department," with both raw, chopped tomatoes and slow roasted cherry tomatoes. The dish is colorful, uncomplicated and uses such a fantastic combination of flavors that it is guaranteed to be a showstopper, despite its simplicity.