Hi Kathy, thanks for visiting my site. i wanted to return the nice gesture of you leaving a comment and i love your pasta article.  I'm Italian but still feel like i know NOTHING about all the pastas. I've just added your site as a favorite AND that other page you directed us to with all the pictures. I love it! my favorite is cavatelli. mmmm!!

Hi Kathy

Just read the first part of your excellent website – it’s full of good advice! Especially for students And I know whereof I speak there…

My favourite pasta dish is from ‘Real Fast Food’ by Nigel Slater, an English food writer. His book has good recipes that take less than 30 minutes.

The dish combines penne or any shell-shape pasta with a sauce of chopped olives, anchovies, mushrooms, garlic and parsley. It’s fantastic and EASY. I’ll bring you a copy of Real Fast Food when see you in March.

Love Sheila

I like to boil rotini (the corkscrews) for 10 min., drain it,  and just give it some butter, pepper, and a can of drained, minced clams. MMMMMM

What type of macroni do you use to make macroni pudding?
Thank You

I love lasagna and pie!

One of the considerations in picking the appropriate pasta is surface area. For instance, if you're making a pasta salad, chances are the dressing is going to be a bit thin. So, you want a pasta that has a lot of surface area, such as a rotini or fusili. The noodles look small, relative to say lasagne noodles, but all those nooks and crannies add up to a lot of surface which all holds a coating.

Another thing to think about is structure and texture. You wouldn't want to build a lasagne out of macaroni noodles. It would be tough to layer, and tough to meter out servings. And if you want something meaty under a bold sauce, the heaviness of a penne or rigatoni is a good choice.

Shell noodles are gread in soups, as they carry some soup along with them. The really large ones can be stuffed, as can manicotti, although I've always thought of that kind of thing as a bit pretentious and so should be reserved for showing off <grin>

The rest of the fanciful shapes I think are more marketing tricks than anything else. But, a great deal of eating happens with the eyes, so a fancy appearance can be a Good Thing.

At their very roots, pastas, pastries, and breads are all the same thing - flour. The difference is pasta is basically flour and water, pastry is basically flour and fat/oil, and breads/cakes add yeast and sugar to make bubbles so they're fluffy. How they're handled is different, and of course there may be other ingredients.

But, for school, they may not be willing to let you split hairs about what something "basically" is. So, for an interesting pasta dessert, how about this Orange Pasta?

i so love cookin pasta it jus gives off that wonderful tastes an makes me feel great

Can anyone tell me where I can buy Kataifi? I hae searched all supermarkets and cant find it and wonder if it goes by a different name??

Thanks KGW!  I have never heard the term Kataifi.

No problem. I've only heard of it because we happen to have one of the largest concentrations of mid-eastern immigrants in the world not far from here in Dearborn, MI. Something like 350,000 of them now call it home, and it's what you might imagine Bagdad would look like if it cleaned up and caught up to the 21st century. It's pretty bizarre, actually. A lot of the women still wear the traditional full-cover clothing, veils and all, and everywhere you go all you hear is Farsi.