Pasta

The fried eggs add extra unctuousness to a clever carbonara.

While reminiscent of a marinara sauce, red bell pepper, cognac, and jalapeño add hints of newness to this luscious, traditional favorite lobster dish.

Hold the marinara! For a change of pace, dress ravioli with a quick and creamy sauce that gets added taste and texture from tiny pieces of string beans and prosciutto.

Shake up your casserole rotation with a Greek pastitsio. Layers of ziti, meaty tomato sauce fragrant with spices, and silky béchamel come together in this deeply satisfying yet simple meal.

Luke Ostrom is a great cook. We've worked together for a long time; we've spent long nights drinking and talking food; we even traveled through Italy together. He knows his stuff, no doubt. So when he tells me we should try something, I usually listen. But when he started going on about orzo in our opening-menu-planning sessions, I was less than enthusiastic. He loved it when he was a kid, he said. It was so soul-satisfying and delicious, he said. It would make a great side dish on our menu, he said. But I wasn't buying it. I thought orzo was the kind of comfort food you fed to children and invalids: too bland, too soft, too ... boring. Boy, was I wrong. Luke's take on orzo can definitely qualify as comfort food: it's hearty, warm, and delicious, the kind of thing you can't stop eating. But it's also grown-up and complex: the wild mushrooms give it a rich earthiness, and the orzo has a great mouth-feel. It's sort of like the mushroom risotto of your dreams—only it's way easier. It's a great match with poultry or meat; but as far as I'm concerned, ain't nothing wrong with sitting down to a big heaping bowlful of this stuff all on its own, topped with a handful of Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Instead of breadcrumbs, this mac and cheese is topped with rich, pungent caramelized shallots and creamy, crumbled goat cheese.

When adding the pesto and hot water to the pasta, taste to get a good balance of flavor and texture.

A light sauce of white wine and tomatoes lets the seafood shine in this iconic Italian pasta dish.

A simple white wine, garlic, and parsley sauce is all that's needed to complement the fresh shellfish in this Italian pasta dish.

Penne, a tubular, pointed pasta, looks great alongside the zucchini blossoms.

While traditional couscous with its exotic spices is the stuff of cold winter nights, I love that the same spices—ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, and cumin—can make a cool couscous salad that's perfect on even the sultriest days. My favorite go-along is grilled chicken, but the salad is also good with grilled fish. When I've got leftover couscous, I spoon it onto a bed of lightly dressed greens, surround it with slices of tomato (and sometimes hard-boiled eggs), and call it lunch.

Executive food editor Kemp Minifie brought the idea for this restorative pasta from her own home. Everyone in the test kitchen loved the briny intensity of feta and olives offset by sweet currants and slightly bitter chard. The garlic doesn’t stay crisp for long, so be sure to serve immediately.

Instead of traditional baked pasta, we broiled mozzarella-topped penne and sausage to get that bubbly melted cheese everyone loves, minus a lot of oven time.

Sweet-tart pomegranate adds intriguing depth to this braise. It can be made with boneless or bone-in meat. If using boneless, buy a half pound less lamb.

In this clever combo, garlicky scampi meet spicy shrimp fra diavolo. Serve as an appetizer with grilled bread or spoon over polenta or orzo for a main course. Panko can be found in the Asian foods section of many supermarkets.

Neal Fraser, Executive Chef and co-owner of Grace and BLD in Los Angeles, shared the recipe for this elegant pasta dish with Epicurious: Fresh pasta shells are tossed with lobster, peas, rich Mascarpone cheese, and fresh herbs. It's one of the best-selling dishes at Grace. It's best to use fresh or thawed, frozen cavatelli, which the sauce will really cling to, but other fresh pasta shells or, in a pinch, dried pasta could be substituted.

If possible, use flat no-cook lasagna noodles: They look and taste more like homemade than the curly kind.

Until quite recently, Italian restaurants in the U.S. served just one version of gnocchi: the potato kind. But gnocchi made from semolina (such as this one from the James Beard Award-nominated, industrial-chic Osteria in Philadelphia) is equally authentic.