Don't Waste Opportunities to Make Homemade Fresh Pasta Recipes Zing

An easy way to make a canneloni recipe zing is to use a fresh spinach and black olive lasagna sheet and roll up your own cannelloni rolls. Make the most of your homemade pasta recipe with this simple but exquisite vegetarian pasta bake. Organic leeks are not essential but as with any other dish organic vegetables make all the difference. If you are making this recipe for carnivores you can add some smoked ham such as Proscuitto. Over the years the classic French and Italian chefs have all claimed to have invented the classic Béchamel Sauce and I have to confess that it is impossible to prove one way or the other but at the end of the day "Who cares?" the roux is easy to make and once enriched with cream and egg yolk and nutmeg it will judged perfect.

Homemade Leek Cannelloni with Provolone Cheese

Ingredients

The leeks

4 organic leeks

Handful of lemon thyme

2 cloves of garlic

Sea Salt

Black pepper

Ricotta cheese

The tomato gastrique

Large onion or two shallots

2 cloves of garlic peeled and finely chopped

Tin of Italian Peeled Tomatoes

2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar

1 teaspoon of salt

The Classic Béchamel Sauce

40 g flour

40 g butter

1/2 an onion

2 cloves

1 bayleaf

Freshly grated nutmeg

290ml/½ pint milk

Dash of heavy cream

1 Organic egg yolk

Provolone Cheese to taste.

Homemade Spinach and Olive Pasta

2 large organic eggs

10 Ounces (300g) fresh spinach, rinsed dry, and finely chopped;

OR 6 Ounces (170g) frozen chopped spinach, defrosted and squeezed completely dry

400g unbleached organic stone ground flour

Method

To make the pasta

Make a large mound of flour on your work surface and make a well in the centre with your hand. Finely chop the spinach and olives and beat in the eggs, and then pour into the well of the flour on the work surface. Work the flour into the centre with your hands; it is a thankless messy task, but the best way of making pasta. When the dough comes together, knead it loosely for about three to four minutes. It should be sticky, but still elastic. Continue kneading by hand until the dough becomes satiny and elastic do not attempt to cut this step because it is one of the most important steps.

For the leeks

Fry the 4 leek in butter add lemon thyme and crush 2 cloves of garlic. Add a small amount of water, sea salt and black pepper. Chill and add the ricotta to taste.

Make a concentrated tomato sauce to go underneath the cannelloni. Sauté a large onion or two shallots and garlic in olive oil, add a tin of chopped Italian tomatoes, reduce it right down then make a gastrique. Put two tablespoons of vinegar in a pan with a teaspoon of sugar, boil it down to an essence then add salt and black pepper. Add to the tomatoes and it gives them a real lift and takes them to the next level.

Make a simple classic béchamel sauce by boiling milk with half an onion studded with cloves, 2 bay leaves, a few peppercorns then simmer, but don't let it boil. In another saucepan make a roux of butter and flour, then pour the sieved milk into the roux and whisk briskly to make a smooth sauce. Add a bit of cream and some grated provolone, a cows milk cheese from Southern Italy add an egg yolk to make it brown.

To assemble the dish

Pour the tomato gastrique into a dish. Roll out the pasta by hand or with a pasta machine and cut the dough into cannelloni tubes. Then add a tablespoon of the leek and ricotta filling and roll up the tube, place over the tomato. Top with the Béchamel Sauce and add the nutmeg and sprinkle the cheese bake 200 degrees centigrade for half an hour until the top is golden.

I am an ex chef who loves to cook and prepare food. I am a squidoo addict and my Squidoo pages are my hobby. Read more of my pages at Perfect Holiday Cheesecakes Or Classic Italian Recipes.

How to Make a Great Pasta Recipe With Leftover Chicken

If you have leftover breast, thigh, or another part of the bird, you might be wondering what to do with it. After all, you cannot make leftover poultry into a chicken cordon bleu. The perfect solution is to combine your leftover poultry with pasta and a few other ingredients and make a delicious pasta dish. This certainly makes more sense than giving it to the dog!

Leftover cooked chicken only needs to heat through since it is already cooked and further cooking will only dry it out, so you will need to add it to your recipe at the end and just warm it through. You can use any kind of pasta you like for this recipe - macaroni, penne, and spaghetti are just a few options. Cook the pasta as directed on the package and make the sauce while it cooks.

How to Make the Pasta Sauce

Use a readymade sauce or make your own with tomato sauce, fresh herbs and perhaps some vegetables. The fastest way to cook the vegetables for a sauce is to finely dice them and saute them in oil or butter. Zucchini, carrot, onion, garlic, broccoli, bell pepper and mushrooms all work well. Season the vegetables with salt, pepper and perhaps some chili powder or Tabasco sauce if you fancy a spicy kick.

Combine the sauce and the cooked vegetables, and then add the chicken and perhaps some cream cheese or sour cream and stir the mixture well. Once every component in the sauce is warm, it is done. When the pasta is cooked, drain it well and toss it with the sauce. You can serve this delicious recipe to the family and rest assured that they will love it. Serve some grated cheese on the side so they can sprinkle it over the top.

Feel free to add other meat to this dish if you want because chicken is versatile enough to combine with various other ingredients such as chopped ham, cooked bacon, or even slices of sausage.

If you have some cooked beef to use up, you can add that to the recipe as well. You might not think that chicken would go with beef but think about pizzas where these meats are often used together. The great thing about pasta recipes is that you can often use up your leftover meat and vegetables and the tasty sauce makes everything taste fresh rather than leftover.

Other Uses for Leftover Chicken

You can use the leftover meat to make omelets or add it to a stir fry. You can even make a baked chicken rice recipe by cooking some rice and transferring it to a glass dish with some cooked chicken and a sauce. Bake it until the rice is crispy around the edges and everything is hot and cooked through. Twenty minutes at 400 degrees F is usually sufficient.

This is especially nice if you grate some cheese over the top before putting the dish in the oven. Melted cheese toppings work nicely with pasta and rice dishes and you can try mozzarella, cheddar, blue cheese or anything else you like.

Whether you fancy making an easy baked chicken rice recipe or a delicious chicken cordon bleu to impress your family or dinner guests, there is no doubt that boneless chicken is simple to work with and versatile enough to use in many kinds of mouthwatering recipes.

BonelessChickenRecipe.com - Chicken so delightfully moist, you can almost smell it through your monitor.

How to Invent Your Own Pasta Recipes

If you are looking for a specific dish, you might like to use a recipe search engine to find exactly what you are looking for. If however you are feeling creative, it is possible to invent your own pasta recipes with relative ease.

First of all, choose what kind of pasta you want to use. Pasta comes in white or whole wheat and lots of different shapes, including penne, bowties, spaghetti, shells and many more. It does not matter too much which pasta you choose but bear in mind that big pasta shapes like shells or tubes are good if you have a chunky sauce because more sauce will stick to those shapes than spaghetti for example.

The Easiest Way to Make a Pasta Sauce

The quickest and simplest way to invent a pasta recipe is to cook the vegetables and sauce while the pasta cooks. If the pasta is cooked before the sauce is done, simply drain it, and cover the pot tightly. It will keep warm. Maybe you want to use hard vegetables like carrots in your pasta recipe, in which case you can finely chop them and cook them in the pot with the pasta.

Chop all your vegetables the same size. You can choose from asparagus, mushrooms, onion, garlic, zucchini, eggplant, broccoli and many more. When you vegetables are chopped up, heat a couple of tablespoons of oil or some cooking spray in a wok.

Add the vegetables to the oil and cook them until they are tender. If you want to make a healthy pasta recipe, you can use water instead of oil. The vegetables will cook just as well but, because water evaporates and oil does not, you might have to keep adding more.

When the vegetables are tender, it is time to add some liquid to make a sauce. The simplest way to do this is to use a jar of pasta sauce but you can also make your own easily enough (and more cheaply).

Combine sieved tomatoes or tomato sauce with fresh basil, pine nuts, sliced olives, chopped anchovies, or anything else you fancy. Add some salt and black pepper for flavor, and a few drops of Tabasco sauce if you like spice.

Throw in a can of salmon, mackerel, or tuna if you like, or even some leftover beef or chicken. For extra creaminess, add some cream cheese, sour cream, heavy cream or grated cheese. Stir the pasta into the sauce and stir it well. Keep cooking it over a low heat until everything is hot, and then serve.

How to Serve Your Homemade Pasta

Top your pasta with some fresh basil leaves and serve it with parmesan cheese. The family will be very impressed with your unique pasta dish and you can rest assured that there are so many different ways to make pasta recipes, each time will be different. Inventing pasta recipes is a great way to use up leftover meat, poultry or fish, as well as vegetables, which are past their prime.

Sometimes it is fun to make up your own recipes but at other times a recipe search is just what you need, especially if you are looking for the best holiday recipes and other recipes for special occasions.

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Find Pasta Recipes That You Enjoy

Do you always wonder how eating right can help you improve as an athlete?

Michael Phelps is not human. He is not a human being. If you watched the Olympics this past summer, you probably heard about his preposterous 12,000 calorie a day diet. He eats pounds and pounds of pasta on a daily basis. One may ask if he really needs all that energy. In fact, he does, if he did not eat enough calories, he loses weight. He actually needs to eat enough in order for his body to stay at its peak levels. Pasta is a great source of energy because it is a complex carbohydrate. I have always loved pasta and therefore most of my cookbook contains tons of pasta recipes.

Complex carbohydrates are usually whole grain foods, vegetables, and fruits. They are comprise of three types of dietary fiber: cellulose, hemicellulose, and gums, also known as starches. It is true starchy food like bread and pasta are high in calories, but they are not actually. Starchy foods provide ~four calories per gram compare to nine calories per gram in fat. This is why, many researchers have proven pasta recipes are included in some of the best athletes daily diet regime. Athletes usually eat nutritionally enhanced pasta, such as whole eat, whole grain, high fiber pasta, and pasta with omega-3. You can actually find these at your local grocery store.

As a regular consumer, my goal is to discover not only economical feasible food, but healthy as well. And being avid about pasta recipes, it is comforting to know pasta is an excellent source for carbohydrates. Keep in mind; there is a HUGE difference when someone is talking about simple carbohydrates and high glycemic index.

I consider pasta meals actually a healthy meal because studies have proven carbohydrates such as pasta is vital to an athlete's diet. Carbs is like fuel for the body. I am not going to get into the specifics on how it works, but our body breaks down what we eat, stores as glycogen in our muslces. Athletes' jobs are to store as much glycogen in their bodies so they can perform at their best. Even after you exercise, eating protein is very important in replenishing the glycogen you lost during heavy activity.

Enough with the facts, here are my eating diet. Pasta, pasta, pasta, and more pasta. Eat pasta before you run, the carbs you are consuming are very helpful. Also, eat after heavy activity (running, lifting, etc), and do not forget to rehydrate yourself. By the time you are feeling thirsty, too late, you are already dehydrated.

However, do not go looking at all the pasta recipes and stuff yourself with enormous portions of pasta everyday. Proper nutrition is VERY important to athletes. In fact, too much pasta can actually hurt your body. Make sure you are consuming carbs, not fat. Eating pasta with melted butter, excessive pasta sauce is not an athlete's best friend. In addition, the timing of eating is very crucial. If you eat a giant meal before competition, you might as well wave the white flag. A more appropriate strategy is a healthy amount at breakfast or lunch. Eating pasta at earlier meals gives your body plenty of time for the food to process through your body system.

All in all, take care of your body by choosing carefully what you put in your mouths. And again, athlete's best friend's are pasta recipes!

Easy Pasta Recipes - The Perfect Healthy Option for People in a Hurry!

Let's start with the basics. After a long day at work or rushing around looking after your family, probably the last thing you want to do is spend hours and hours preparing and cooking a meal. At the same time, you don't really want to feed yourself and your family with quick and tasteless microwave dinners or fatty takeaways that just don't give you the nutrients you need. Well, at least not everyday!

So, how to solve this apparent dilemma? Well, how about giving yourself the satisfaction of eating something genuinely tasty that you cooked up from scratch in less than half an hour?

Let's move on to basic point number two - everybody likes pasta. OK, so maybe a few people don't much care for it, or are allergic to wheat, but to the nearest approximation the phrase 'everybody likes pasta' is pretty much bang on the money.

Pasta is so versatile! It comes in more shapes and sizes than can be comfortably written in an article of this length, can be served with all manner of meat, fish and vegetables, goes well with hundreds of sauces and can even be served as a salad. Better still, you can make your own fresh pasta in less than ten minutes, if you really want to.

With a few simple vegetables and a selection of common herbs and spices, plenty of garlic and olive oil, and meat or fish of your choice (or not, if you like vegetarian food) you can whip up a whole range of really easy pasta recipes in hardly anytime at all, and find enough variety to serve a different exciting meal for yourself or your family.

Of course, nobody wants to eat pasta everyday (although this author is such a lover of pasta that some weeks he comes close) but pasta dishes are so simple and versatile that you can easily have pasta three days a week and never eat the same quick and easy pasta recipe in the same month.

Even if you think you're a terrible cook, with easy pasta recipes you'll discover that just a few simple ingredients can be delicious, and only a minimum of culinary skill is required.

So next time you come home feeling tired and hungry, don't just pull a microwave dinner out of the freezer or reach for the takeaway pizza company's leaflet, chop a few veg and boil yourself up some delicious pasta, and eat a satisfying meal without the hassle of really 'cooking' at all.

At Easy Pasta Recipes you'll find a selection of deliciously easy pasta recipes, perfect for when you want a healthy and tasty meal in no time. Visit Easy Pasta Recipes for more information.