Pasta tastes so good in Italy because it's cooked with care and attention to detail.
Savoring a dish of perfect pasta, like experiencing your first love, is a moment in time that's all too fleeting. Not to exclude the pasta traditions from elsewhere around the world, but for a beginning cook, chances are that Italian dishes are very familiar already and thus ideal teaching tools. Indeed, you've probably already enjoyed many of the kinds of recipes you'll learn this month, but we've put an especially healthy and tasty spin on our own variations. The pasta names are probably well known to you, too-spaghetti, lasagna, fusilli, ziti, fettuccine, penne. But learning to take each of these neighborly noodles and combine them with flavors and techniques full of both Italian and Italian-American influences will give you a tremendous inventory of tastes and traditions for more meals than you can count.