The Crying Cook : pasta

Our weekly menu usually includes a pasta dish. While French is my favorite cuisine to eat out, Italian is my favorite to make at home. So many good things start with a tomato sauce, but with pasta primavera my only exception, a pasta dinner is light on the veggies, if there are any at all. These meatballs are my effort to put something green in these dinners, similar to the ziti recipe.

Ingredients & Tools

2 lbs. ground turkey
1 package of thawed, drained frozen spinach
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper
2 teaspoons dried basil
2 tablespoons garlic powder
2 tablespoons dried oregano
2 tablespoons Kosher salt
a large bowl

Add the dried spices to the turkey and gently work them in with your hands. Avoid squishing the turkey or overmixing because you'll end up with dense meatballs.

Create a patty in your hand and add spinach to the center. I don't measure this. I just ensure there's enough spinach that the title of this recipe makes sense, but not so much that actually forming the meatball is tough.

That one on the bottom looks like it's going rogue.

Brown the meatballs in batches or cook them all at once on jelly rolls in the oven. I still need jelly rolls, so I do this on the stovetop.

Make your favorite sauce or use a store-bought brand--there's no shame in that. I use one 28 ounce can of crushed tomatoes and dried spices.

Cook the meatballs in your sauce for about 20 minutes or until they're cooked all the way through.

Enjoy your pasta dinner with a bit less guilt.

I cannot make lasagna. I've tried, but the noodles and the amount of sauce get me every time. I've blundered boiling the noodles; they stick together, rip, and tear. One of my lasagna attempts with one of the no-boil pastas was swimming in a pool of sauce. The optimist in me wanted to present it as lasagna soup.

Choose your culinary battles wisely. Ziti, to this total non-Italian, has the same flavors as lasagna with 100% less headache. I make two batches at a time because it's not at all double the work and then I have a entire dinner with leftovers in the freezer. I started making double batches of ziti when my husband and I, then dating, first moved in together. We were living in a smaller Brooklyn apartment that had a kitchen that was comparatively enormous to what we have now. Go figure.

Ingredients & Tools

2 lbs. ziti
2 lbs. ground turkey [beef or chicken]
2 28 oz. cans of crushed tomatoes
16 oz. shredded mozzarella
15 oz. ricotta cheese
2 defrosted boxes of frozen spinach
2 tablespoons oregano
2 tablespoons garlic
1 tablespoon basil
1/2 tablespoon red pepper flakes
4 teaspoons Kosher salt
olive oil
2 large pots with lids
collander
2 oven and freezer-safe dishes

Add about 2 tablespoons of olive oil to a large pot and brown the protein. I'm making beef stew this week, so I went with ground turkey for this dinner.

Drain the protein of your choice and fill another pot with water for the pasta. Crank up the heat and cover it.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In the pot where you cooked the meat, add another 2 tablespoons of olive oil and the dried herbs. Ina Garten cooks dried herbs and spices to "wake up" the flavors. She's a genius, so I do what she does. This "waking up" takes under a minute.

Add both cans of crushed tomatoes.

Add 4 teaspoons of Kosher salt. Add the ground turkey/beef/chicken and cover the pot. Allow the sauce to simmer for about 20 minutes, as the pasta cooks.

Cook the pasta just under al dente, following the directions on the box. I cooked my ziti for 9 minutes. Drain and get the assembly line ready. Start by placing a thin layer of sauce at the bottom of each baking dish to prevent sticking.

Add a layer of ziti. Look, it doesn't matter if they're all lined up! In fact, it'd be pretty hard to line up ziti noodles. Rejoice in the freedom.

Totally drain the thawed spinach. This involved squeezing the life out of these greens. You don't want to add unnecessary liquid. Add all of one box of spinach to each of the dishes. I know lasagna doesn't traditionally have spinach, but I like to have a vegetable with dinner and this is an easy way to get a serving in.