Baked Ziti Recipes and Beyond

Doctoring good-quality jarred tomato sauce, like Rao's, with ground meat, onion, garlic and spices makes this ziti superfast.

Meaty mushrooms are enhanced by sweet caramelized onions and just enough tangy melted goat cheese in this delicious year-round pasta.

You'll want nothing more with this full-flavored pasta than a green salad or, in season, plain sliced tomatoes.

Everyone loves a great baked ziti dish. This one adds chicken and cheese for a tasty, hearty meal.

Because it's baked, this pasta takes a bit longer from kitchen to table than other dishes in this book. You'll find the preparation time, though, is just as short as that of any other recipe here.

Jimmy Bannos Jr.'s Italian grandmother served meatballs and sausage along with the pork neck bones in her Sunday-supper gravy. For his version, Bannos picks all the meat off the bones, then stirs it back into the gravy.

You'll find an interesting technique here that guarantees juicy chicken: The boneless meat is steamed to moist perfection in hot chicken broth--off the heat.

Eggplant is sauteed in olive oil until it's creamy soft and then tossed with pasta and cheese. A quick stint under the broiler melts the fontina and browns the top.

Roasting vegetables at a high temperature caramelizes them, making them intensely flavorful. You may think of roasting as a long process, but we cut each of the vegetables into small cubes or thin slices so they need only thirty minutes in the oven.