Make-Ahead Italian Meals by Ruth Paget
I read The Country Cooking of Italy by Colman Andrews (available on Amazon Kindle) as part of my summer reading 2026 project to learn more about Italian culture.
I love Italian food and view learning more about it as “lifelong learning.”
I think the following dishes are very cook-friendly, because they all use dry pasta, which you can keep on hand in the pantry to go with market items. Tagliatelle is usually a fresh-made egg pasta originally from Bologna, but even this can be purchased now a dry-ribbon pasta nests or folded in strands.
These dishes are delicious hot, but if you are not too picky, these dishes can be stored in a pyrex dish and heated up for lunch meals or dinner.
When I was younger, I could make meals to warm up thanks to employers having an employee refrigerator. My employers also provided a microwave for employee use.
The dishes from The Country Cooking of Italy that I think would be good make-ahead meals include:
*penne Valdostana – this tubular pasta dish from the French and Italian border region features butter, double cream, taleggio cheese, fontina cheese, and Parmesan cheese cooked with the penne pasta.
I would qualify penne Valdostana as a very upscale macaroni and cheese dish. Whole Foods, Trader Joes, and Target might have all of some of the different cheese called for in the recipe.
*fusilli with Italian sausage and cabbage – this dish comes from the Calabria region in southern Italy opposite the island of Sicily. Fusili is also known as rotini or spring pasta.
Italian sausage is usually flavored with fennel. In this recipe, it is sautéed with cabbage, garlic cloves, Calabrian red peppercorns, and tomato sauce. The pasta is sprinkled with Pecorino Romano and Parmesan cheese.
*stuffed tomatoes baked with olive oil, rice, parsley, basil, garlic cloves, and salt and pepper.
*spaghetti with sautéed shrimp and pesto sauce with crushed pistachio nuts added to it.
*tagliatelle with sautéed chunks of prosciutto, butter, diced onion, double cream, whole milk, salt, pepper, and Parmesan cheese. This rich dish is typical of Bologna, Italy, also know as “la grassa” or “the fat.”
Beginning personal chefs might like trying these dishes, because the ingredients are rather easy to procure. They are perfect for people who do not mind warming up meals during the week.
People who might be interested in hiring a personal chef or working as one might want to read how one family in the San Francisco Bay Area worked with a personal chef so both parents could work and still provide their family with nutritious, homemade meals in the following book:
How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America by Priye Fielding-Singh.
Make-ahead meals, no matter who makes them, seemed to me more time to eat and get errands done when I was a young worker.
The Country Cooking of Italy by Colman Andrews (available on Amazon Kindle) contains many Italian home cooking recipes that lend themselves to make-ahead meals. Readers interested in Italian make-ahead meals might find this book to be very useful.
By Ruth Paget
-author Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Marrying France, and Europe's Lessons written during overseas duty in Germany + 5 other Kindle books
-developer of the Novgorod and Bento War Games + 8 Classical Western Civilization War Games
-developer of food and beverage knowledge games
-creator of online exhibits about San Miguel Arcangel Mission, French baguette making, and the Carmel Valley History Center
-creator of French travel and culture games
-writer of 1800+ Central Coast California lifestyle blogs
-family genealogist
-developer of 9 music theory games
