Basic Ingredients For A Pasta Salad

Pasta salads aren't just vegetarian recipes, even if they lend themselves beautifully to vegetarianism. In actual fact, there's something of a formula for making a pasta salad, and the great thing is that when you come to the "protein" category, you are just as free to add beans and cheese as you are to add cold ham or slicked chicken.

You really just need to remember this formula, and you can almost do without consulting formal recipes at all.

The website www.allrecipes.com/HowTo/Five-Steps-to-Perfect-Pasta-Salad/Detail.aspx has a feature called "Five Steps to Perfect Pasta Salad" that starts, of course, with bite-sized pastas themselves.

The next step includes key ingredients, such as slightly cooked or raw vegetables, some protein like seafood or sliced cooked chicken, or perhaps canned beans and crumbled mild cheeses. She suggests one major flavor supported by two others.

Her third step is "Intense flavors," which involves things like peppers, onions or stronger cheeses. Step four is onions and herbs, and then you would want a creamy or vinaigrette type of dressing.

There are all sorts of good, even responsible reasons to create your own pasta salad. You might not have any other ideas for using the last couple of carrots in your fridge, or perhaps you want to finish off that feta cheese before it goes bad.

Making a salad like this isn't just quick and easy, but can help you make good use of all the food you buy. You can make sure you're not wasting any food, and improvise a healthy meal at the same time.

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Changing Of The Seasons Influencing Italian Pasta Recipes

Like many other types of food, Italian pasta recipes tend to change their nature and composition with the changing of the seasons. You may want the heavier, meatier dishes like spaghetti and meatballs or the thick, meaty, cheesy layers of lasagna during the dead of winter.

But as spring progresses into summer, you may find yourself leaving the meat recipes on the shelf and favoring something lighter, with spring vegetables as the main elements. These pasta dishes can accommodate any season and any mood.

Sometimes all you need in spring and early summer is not so much a bunch of Italian pasta recipes, but just a few herbs and perhaps some feta cheese and kalamata olives with olive oil, or tomatoes with basil and Parmesan cheese.

The pasta itself is almost like a blank canvas upon which you add your own artistic details in the sauces and vegetables you include. But there's no doubt that if you're in the mood for something light, herbs add springtime appeal to pasta dishes.

Italian pasta recipes can please almost any palate and provide meals adapted to virtually any time of year. These dishes can be vegetarian or even vegan, since you can do a lot with herbs and don't always need cheese.

Or the pasta can serve as a bed for delicious, thick meat sauces. It's true that Italian food makes serious use of tomatoes, but even if you can't eat tomatoes, you can also find many Italian recipes with creamy sauces that have not a tomato in sight.

Italian cuisine has a way of pleasing and providing for almost everybody.

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Regional Variations Of Italian Recipes

Did you know that some people believe pasta was first invented in China? Whether it was or not, Italian recipes for pasta go back a long, long time, so obviously if they didn't invent this food, they adopted it as soon as traders introduced it to them.

They really ran with the concept too, which is why we associate so many pasta recipes with Italy. Countless fish and meat recipes for pasta, as well as their sauces, will forever be associated with Italy in most people's minds.

The Italian Made website (http://www.italianmade.com/regions/home.cfm), discusses both Italian recipes as well as the wines associated with different regions of Italy.

It talks about the variations of local cultures in the north, and how they produced a wide variety of culinary influences, while the south produced mostly what is known as the "Mediterranean diet," using ingredients that flourished in the bright sun.

An example of the latter is the "Bucantini with Sardines" pasta dish, which adds raisins, pine nuts and saffron, while a northern recipe might be "Pansuuti con la Salsa di Noci," with pasta envelopes stuffed with ricotta cheese, with walnut sauce.

People may not be aware that tomatoes didn't appear in Europe until well after the initial explorations of the western hemisphere, so Italian recipes didn't feature tomatoes until the early 1800s. Even after tomatoes appeared in Europe, it took a long time before people believed they were really edible.

But the foods that were already prominent in Italy were rich in other delicious ingredients. When you choose vegetable recipes for your pasta, with cheese sauces and without tomatoes, you may well be choosing foods that reflect an earlier era in the country, when Germanic or even Byzantine or Arab influences were most prevalent.

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