EASY PASTA WITH GARLIC, OIL AND FRESH HERBS

This is another quick and easy Italian recipe with only a few ingredients. It is important that you do not burn the garlic with this recipe otherwise it will become bitter.

Ingredients:

1 pound of spaghetti

3 - 4 garlic cloves chopped (more or less, depending on how much you like garlic)

1/2 cup reserved pasta water

1/4 Cup of Chopped Italian Flat Leaf Parsley

1/4 cup of chopped fresh basil leaves

6 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil

Salt to taste

A pinch of red pepper flakes (more or less depending on how spicy you like it)

Directions:

• In a large pot, bring about 6 quarts of salted water to a rolling boil. Add the pasta and cook for about 6 - 8 minutes or until al dente. Drain but make sure you reserve about 1/2 cup of pasta water.

• While the pasta is cooking, heat 4 tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat in a large skillet. Add the garlic and saute until light brown in color. Remember to pay close attention to the garlic to make sure it doesn't burn. Remove from heat.

• Stir in fresh herbs, red pepper flakes, and few tablespoons of the reserved pasta water. Mix until combined.

• Transfer the drained pasta to a large serving bowl and mix in the remaining olive oil and pasta water.

• Add the garlic and herb mixture into the pasta and mix well.

• Taste and add salt and red pepper if desired.

• Serve immediately. Top with grated cheese if desired.

There you have it. Three great easy Italian recipes that you can whip up in a flash and please everyone. I hope you enjoy these easy italian recipes. Happy Cooking!

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EASY ITALIAN PESTO SAUCE RECIPE

Let's learn how to make pesto sauce.

This is another very easy and delicious recipe that can be served over your favorite pasta, grilled chicken, mussels or as a topping for pizza. For those of you who want your basil pesto sauce without pine nuts, you can leave them out or substitute the pine nuts with walnuts. For a nice variation on this recipe, try adding sundried tomatoes to the pesto mixture before blending for a delicious tomato pesto sauce. This recipe should only be used as a guide. Not everyone has the same preferences. Some do not like a lot of garlic or olive oil flavor for example, so it is recommended that you experiment until you find the right recipe.

Pesto Sauce Ingredients:

4 cups fresh basil leaves

3/4 cup chopped walnuts or pine nuts (the nuts can be lightly toasted in a dry pan before blending for added flavor)

2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped (more or less depending on your taste)

1/2 cup of grated Parmesan cheese

1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Add all ingredients to a food processor or blender except olive oil. Add a little oil at a time and process until sauce reaches desired consistency. Ready to serve in your favorite dish.

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Quick and Delicious for the Entire Family

Do you need easy Italian recipes that you can cook up fast that are delicious and inexpensive?

Below are three very simple Italian recipes that do not require much time to prepare and only use several ingredients that you may even have on hand.

This is the beauty of Italian cooking. You do not need a ton of ingredients to cook up a delicious meal.

The key with cooking great Italian food is to use fresh quality ingredients, like fresh herbs and fine olive oil. And the number one most important ingredient in any type of cooking is of course Love!

Enjoy and Buon Appetito!

EASY ITALIAN MARINARA SAUCE RECIPE

Here is a great recipe for marinara sauce using canned tomatoes. This marinara sauce is delicious over your favorite pasta, on top of pizza and over mussels and shrimp. The beauty of this sauce is that it can be used with a number of other recipes, so it's a great starting point in Italian Cooking and it is very easy to make.

You can use either fresh or canned plum tomatoes for this recipe, however using fresh tomatoes requires more time and preparation, so I prefer to use canned. If you do plan on using fresh tomatoes, make certain the tomatoes are ripe and in season.

For the canned tomatoes, I prefer Rienzi brand tomatoes. I have tried a number of different brands of canned tomatoes and Rienzi has the best flavor amongst the supermarket brands, in my opinion.

Marinara Sauce Ingredients:

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

4 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped (More or less depending on how much you like garlic)

1 35 ounce can of whole plum tomatoes with liquid

Salt to taste

Crushed red pepper to taste (You can use black pepper if you wish)

10 - 12 fresh basil leaves , torn

1/2 teaspoon of dried oregano

Directions:

• Open your can of tomatoes and crush them by hand into a bowl and set aside.

• Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add your garlic to the oil and cook until soft and lightly browned. Be sure to watch the garlic to make sure it doesn't burn.

• Carefully add the tomatoes along with their liquid into the pan with the garlic and oil. Use caution when adding the tomatoes to the hot oil. The oil can splatter. Add the oregano.

• Stir the mixture and bring to a boil. Season with a bit of salt and red or black pepper. Lower the heat so that the sauce is reduced to a simmer. Break up the tomatoes as it cooks with a spoon until your sauce is chunky. You want the sauce to simmer until thickened, about 20 - 25 minutes.

• Add your fresh basil a few minutes before the sauce is done. Taste the sauce and add more salt or pepper if needed.

• Serve over your favorite pasta.

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German recipes have a very different flavor to it

Have you traveled to Germany. No.  People think it is far away, so they dont travel. But have you at least tried some of it's delicious german recipes? German people are really good at so many different things, from elaborating any single kind of material to cuisine everything elaborate and perfect. The german recipe food is healthy but most of all exquisite, which makes each bite worth it. You may find a huge variety of german recipes, but if you want to start from zero, you'd better start with the rice.

In order to get the ultimate German flavor in your rice, you'll need first of all rice. You'll also need vegetables, whatever your selection is. In this case we'll use carrots, peas, and cabbage. You might want to add some pork and some eggs. Of course you might want to add as well the traditional Chinese sweet and sour sauce. All these ingredients will make your recipe extremely delicious.

First of all get a pot, fill it with water, and set it to boil. Later you add the rice until it's fully cooked. Meanwhile you can begin with chopping all the different vegetables. Chop the carrots in really small pieces, and cut the cabbage into small pieces as well. In a small pan, crack the egg and make some scrambled eggs. When you have this all ready proceed with the pork. Cut it into really small bites and place in a pan.

After you have all the ingredients ready, check if the rice is ready and if it is, place it in a pan. Add all of the ingredients to it and take a spoon and mix them all with the rice. As it all starts cooking, add little by little the sweet and sour sauce that will give the rice some color. The temperature should be only moderate.

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Cabbage Borscht Mennonite Soup Recipe

It is a delicious Russian soup that is easy to make. At the time when many German Mennonites traveled to Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great, they learned to prepare this authentic Russian beet borscht from their Russian neighbors. However, they used cabbage instead of beet, making a unique soup with a German style. Here is the simple recipe.

Ingredients
Beef soup bones – 2 pounds
Water 2 quarts or as required
12 chopped carrots
6 cubed potatoes
1 finely chopped head cabbage
3 minced onions
Chopped fresh parsley – 1 1/2 tablespoons
Ten allspice berries (whole)
One bay leaf
Half star anise
One teaspoon salt
Ground black pepper – 1 pinch
Chopped tomato – 1 1/2 cups
Heavy cream – 1/2 cup

Directions

Over medium-high heat, boil the beef soup bones in a large bowl with water. Decrease heat and simmer it for 1 and 1/2 hours. To maintain the 2-quart level, add water as required. Remove it from heat, and dispose of the soup bones, then take a fresh pot and strain the broth into it and return to the stove.

Stir all the remaining ingredients – cabbage, carrots, potatoes, parsley, onions, star anise, allspice berries, bay leaf, pepper and salt. Cook the vegetables for about 20 minutes until the potatoes become soft and tender. Put in some tomatoes and boil the soup again. Serve the hot soup in separate bowls of soup and use heavy cream as a topping.

You can serve this hot and delicious soup with freshly baked home bread. It is a complete meal that it contains all four groups of food. You can lend it a spicy and tangy flavor with pickling spice. This will be perfect as a family dinner at a cold winter night.

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Mastering Three Pasta Sauce Recipes you can make Every Day

Making your own pasta sauce recipe is an easy, healthy and cost-effective way to get dinner done. When you learn some basic procedures, it becomes simple to make a variety of sauces to suit almost any pasta. And since you are controlling the ingredients, you know exactly how this sauce ranks on the healthy scale. A great added bonus to going homemade is that making your own sauce will even save you money over buying the jarred variety. Really - there is no reason making homemade sauces shouldn't become a part of your cooking toolkit - a skill you'll be able to use almost every day. Let's review the procedures of three of the most popular and common sauces you'll encounter when making pasta.

Become a Master of the Marinara Sauce Recipe

Tomato Sauce is one of the five "Mother Sauces" in French culinary and the starting point for any marinara sauce recipe. There are two parts to this sauce that are made separately with their own procedure and then come together at the end: tomato concasse and a sauce "base". The sauce base can be meat, vegetables, broth, seafood - whatever you will be using to make YOUR marinara sauce recipe. Tomato concasse sounds fancy, but it simply means a mixture of tomatoes coarsely chopped. But - there is a trick to getting this mixutre sans seeds and skins. Here's my quick technique for blanching tomatoes, which is the first step in making tomato sauce:

• Core tomatoes on one end and score an "x" on the other side with a knife. This will be where the skin peels away during boiling.

• Place tomatoes in a pot of boiling water.

• When the skin at the "x" has peeled back, it is time to remove the tomato and shock it in an ice water bath to stop the cooking. This will vary by tomato due to size and ripeness.

• Peel and seed the tomatoes. Peeling should be very easy. If it's not, the tomato didn't stay in the boiling water long enough.

Depending how you'd like your marinara sauce recipe to end up, you can puree the tomato concasse or keep it chunky.

Now, onto the sauce base. For a simple marinara sauce recipe, you will probably keep this vegetarian, adding vegetables if you prefer a chunky sauce or vegetable broth if you prefer a smoother sauce:

• Saute chopped onions and garlic in a hot pan with a small amount of olive oil.

• Add your tomato concasse (or puree). This is also where you'd add any other vegetables, like mushrooms or peppers, to your tomato sauce.

• Add vegetable broth and reduce to almost dry.

• Add tomato paste to thicken and color - heat through.

• Add the seasonings of your choice. Basil and oregano are the common ones, but experiment to find what you like.

You've now got a great homemade pasta sauce recipe that you can make almost any night of the week. My guess is that this process would take you about 30-45 minutes to prepare. During this time, your pasta is cooking and your meal is ready in under an hour!

Make any White Sauce Recipe with One Procedure

When you think of a white sauce recipe, most often what you are imagining has its roots in the French mother sauce, bechamel. Bechamel forms the foundation for every white sauce recipe - including the favorite fetuccine Alfredo or even the classic macaroni and cheese. The key to making this velvety white sauce smooth is knowing how much milk to add. This is something that is best determined with your eyes - not a recipe!

You start by melting butter on the stove and then removing it from the heat. As you add some flour - a little at a time - you will be watching for the mixture to thicken up to the consistency of wall paper paste. When it does, you've got roux and it is time to return to the heat. Your goal here is to cook the proteins out of the flour. You will know this has happened when the majority of the roux has turned from yellow to white. During the process, you will smell a toasty smell as the proteins cook out. Now you can start adding milk. This is the most important step in making this sauce so take your time here. You will continue to add milk - a little at a time - until the sauce stops thickening. So here's the process:

   1. Add some milk and stir.
   2. Stop stirring and observe.
   3. If sauce starts thickening back up over the heat, add more milk.
   4. Continue steps 1-3 until the sauce doesn't thicken back up (in step 3).

I like a garlic flavor to my white sauce recipe so here's a trick for adding garlic, but not adding the lumps of chopped garlic. I simmer whole garlic cloves in the sauce for a bit and then remove them before serving. This will infuse a nice garlic flavor into my white sauce recipe. Finally, if you are making an Alfredo (or macaroni and cheese), this is where you would add your favorite cheese(s), stirring over heat as they melt.

A Buttery Garlic Sauce Recipe in Less then 30 Minutes

I saved my favorite garlic sauce recipe for last for a couple of reasons. First, it is a great sauce because you can make it rather quickly, using ingredients you most likely have on hand. However, this homemade pasta sauce recipe can be a little bit trickier than the first two, which makes some shy away from it. But, don't worry. With a few tips, you'll be making this one like a pro tonight!

Again, we start with one of the French culinary mother sauces - this time: beurre blanc, a saute of shallot (with garlic) and any liquid mounted with cold butter. The trick to this sauce is to always keep the butter yellow. If your butter stays yellow, it means that the sauce has not broken. Here is my best tip for keeping the butter yellow in your garlic sauce recipe. This is one time, we don't start with a hot pan (as we normally would in saute method). The cold pan and cold butter hit the heat together. To melt the butter, without burning it:

   1. Melt a little bit of butter.
   2. Remove from hit and swirl around to melt more butter
   3. Return to heat for a couple of seconds to get the butter hot again.
   4. Remove from heat and swirl around to melt more butter.
   5. Repeat steps 1-4 until all the butter is melted.

When the butter is melted, you add your shallot and garlic and saute, but you don't want to brown anything here. Controlling the heat (so as not to separate the butter) is the most important secret for success when making this sauce. Keep the butter yellow - can't stress that enough! Once the shallots and garlic have cooked to become translucent in color, add a cold liquid (usually white wine) and then cold butter, cut in consistent squares. 

If the pan starts to get too hot (as evidenced by white specs floating to the top of the butter), you will remove it from heat and add more cold butter to cool the sauce quickly.  You can always heat it back up again when you cool it - but you can't fix it once it has actually broken. When you are satisfied with the consistency and flavor of the garlic sauce recipe you've created, add salt and white pepper to taste and serve on your favorite pasta. A great pasta sauce recipe starts where all sauces start - basic cooking methods and the "mother sauces" of French culinary. You don't have to be a chef to apply these techniques and make everyday cooking at home easier, tastier and cheaper than eating out at your favorite restaurant.

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Learn French Cooking

The best chefs in the world are considered to be French as they look upon creating food as an art and aim to provide nothing less than a masterpiece that should come out of their kitchen doors. Thus, French chefs, famed for creating gastronomical delights with their varied styles and techniques, each school differing in the methods of preparing food depending on which of 26 French regions they belong to, are regarded as the top teachers of the influences of European cuisine. The different regions in France contribute to the flavors in French cooking; for example, Alsace, near Germany, is famous for its raisin cakes, sausages, salted pork, and high quality potatoes that are the basics for a hearty meal at all times, while the Alps brings in many different flavors of cheese.

French Cooking Recipes

Some of the best resources for easy and best French cooking recipes can be initiated from searching them in cookbooks, magazines and on the internet, which is home to hundreds of websites dedicated to cooking craft. Besides this, there is added scope for collecting the best French cooking recipes that are in circulation in friend's groups and people who have been using these throughout their lives to last your entire lifetime, if not beyond - should you need more! Plentiful options for healthy, balanced and tasty meals are what French cooking recipes aim to create for their chefs.

Always begin with one cuisine style or idea as trying to change a full menu all at once with fancy French cooking recipes may well jigger up your chances of getting it right. French cooking recipes typically call for buying seasonal, fresh foodstuffs after studying family tastes, which can be prepared innovatively to give a distinct taste - but without tiring out the cook!

Do ensure you take enough time to learn varied methods of cooking with a French style as these techniques are what make a good Chef; at times, there are options for enrolling in a home-study program or even signing up for a neighborhood French cooking class, so study these choices if open to you.

Some of these French cooking classes include The Walnut Grove, which maintains a strict number of student-count (4) assigned to each chef so there is a personal interaction involved and maximum attention can be given to the learners. The most important aspect of French cooking classes is that they stress on the use of only fresh ingredients as they believe these seasonal ingredients are smart to use since they release natural flavors, besides being great to prepare and present. This school abides by a certain dedication to letting students learn by doing rather.

The best French cooking schools are the ones that teach students a wide variety of skills and the ones that go beyond traditional French cuisine. Arpaia is a great example of that. The business woman was raised in a Greek home, yet didn't have the skills necessary to run a restaurant. After attending classes at the French Culinary Institute, she learned how the basics of food preparation and was able to use that in her future career.

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