Product Description

Why cook if you don't have to? This brilliant new approach to pasta, written by best-selling cookbook author Joie Warner, offers 75 deliciously easy pasta sauces -- all ready in minutes without turning on a burner. These no-cook sauces are whipped up while the pasta water boils, and heated when they mingle with the linguine, fettuccine, or other steaming hot pasta. Using only a handful of vibrantly flavorful ingredients such as olives, citrus, tomatoes, capers, goat cheese, and succulent herbs, Warner shows how to turn out fantastic dishes in a matter of minutes -- no joke, no catch, we promise! Imagine such sauces as savory Puttanesca, Asian-Style Sesame with Roasted Red Peppers, Creamy Tomato and Gorgonzola, or Green Pea and Prosciutto made from scratch and ready to eat by the time the spaghetti is al dente. This is the book we've all been waiting for -- finally, a fresh take on pasta!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #281837 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Amazon.com Review
Keep the right pastas in your pantry, along with the other ingredients recommended by Joie Warner, plus a few items in the fridge, and you can always enjoy a heaping plate of pasta tossed with any of a variety of zesty sauces simply by boiling water to cook the pasta while you combine the ingredients for the topping. This is the promise Warner proves to perfection in 75 high-flavor ways. For example, she adds chopped tomatoes to a homemade Caesar salad dressing tossed with bow ties and tops linguine with Spicy Tomato Salsa.

For sauces using meat, poultry, or seafood, she sometimes "cheats" a bit: in Tomato Sauce with Clams, you warm the sauce by placing it in a bowl set over the steaming pasta pot. And for Blue Cheese and Broccoli Sauce, you do cook the broccoli--by tossing it into the pot along with the pasta, but this is so efficient, who cares?

Color photos, taken by Warner's husband, are so sunlit that the food on every page looks like a cheerful feast. --Dana Jacobi

From Publishers Weekly
There is no need to sweat over a hot stove, Warner (All the Best Pasta Sauces; All the Best Pizza) says, when you can prepare simple yet often elegant pasta sauces that don't require cooking. To demonstrate, she presents 75 simple, no-cook sauce recipes. These sauces actually "cook" (or heat up) when tossed with freshly made hot pasta, ensuring that the home cook is out of the kitchen pronto. Cooks who favor a Mediterranean flair with their pasta will gravitate to such sauces as Tomato Sauce with Olives, Feta and Mint. The more adventurous might want to try Sesame Sauce with Roasted Red Peppers or the Smoked Salmon, Capers, and Dill Sauce. Some unexpected combinations are Pumpkin and Basil Sauce and Luscious Lemon and Mascarpone Sauce. The recipes are made inviting in the lush, serving-suggestion photographs provided by the author's husband, Drew Warner. This friendly book isn't for home chefs contemplating serious party fare; but it's ideal for cooks who are pressed for time and short on inspiration.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Cooking couldn't get much easier than this-combone a few simple ingredients, toss with pasta and you've got dinner. It's the pretty-nearly-perfect concept for hot summer nights, as detailed in Joie Warner's new cookbook, 'No-Cook Pasta Sauces.' The pasta still needs to be cooked, but we can live with that." -- Washington Post

When it's too hot to hang around the stove and you're bored with tending a smoky charcoal grill, wake up your taste buds with fresh, simple, bursting-with-flavor dishes from the new Joie Warner's No-Cook Pasta Sauces. Once you catch on to the concept, you almost don't need the book. But Warner has such winning flavor combinations, it would be a shame to miss any. Here's the plan:

Have add-in ingredients at room temperature.
Cook the pasta in boiling water and drain it.
Quickly stir in the add-in ingredients.

That's all. It almost sounds too easy to taste great, but this is one time when the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. You'll need only one pot of boiling water. While it heats, chop some fresh summer things—a fistful of vibrant herbs and some ripe, juicy tomatoes. Grate or crumble a chunk of robust cheese. Open the pantry for fruity olive oil, capers or marinated artichokes. Cheat a little by adding meats that need no additional cooking: prosciutto, smoked salmon, leftover chicken or canned tuna. The pasta's heat intensifies the flavors and aromas of the ingredients in a way that cold pasta salads can't.

Customer Reviews

pretty good if you KNOW you'll be pressed for time
I like this book for those nights when I know ahead of time I'm going to be crunched for time. I'm the kind of person who plans a week of meals at a time before grocery shopping, with an eye on what nights will be busy vs. when I'll have oodles of time. I also keep a pretty extensive pantry on hand. I think if those 2 things weren't true, this book would lose alot of its usefulness. But with the right ingredients around, there are some good quick meals in here.

A few things to be aware of:
- These recipes are LOADED with butter, oil, and fatty cheeses, typically half a stick of butter, 1/2 a cup of cheese to serve 4.
- There is a little bit of prep required before you boil the water, but it's light, like chopping a garlic clove or grating some cheese.
- Most of these recipes uses strong tasting ingredients, like raw chopped garlic, crushed red pepper, and basil. If you don't like these ingredients, you might not like a lot of these recipes.

So, with those caveats, I would recommend this book. I especially like the sauce made from riccotta cheese, bottled red peppers, basil, garlic and parmesan cheese. I typically serve these with boiled broccoli and quick frozen garlic bread, and dinner is ready in like 20 minutes.

The Best and Easiest to Prepare Pasta Sauces!
My neighbor and friend received this book for Christmas and raved about it, promising to let me borrow it. She did....for two whole days then retrieved it. Seems she uses it several times weekly and could not do without it any longer. I searched a couple of local bookstores for it and also a cooking website to no avail. I'm so happy to have found it that I'm ordering one for myself and my sister. It's GREAT!

A must for any cook
As an owner of many cook books I have found this one the most convienient by far for a quick and satisfying pasta meal. The flavor combinations are new and tasty. Ingredients can be subsitued for low and fat free meals.