Pasta Recipes To Try When You Don't Want Red Sauce

It's hard to explain, but some days you just really crave a plate of delicious pasta. Those carb-packed noodles in a variety of shapes and colors are filling and energizing -– they even help fight off being "hangry." There also is a wide variety of healthy noodles to work with ranging from whole wheat, rice noodles, and black bean to red lentil. When paired with a healthy green salad or a buttery garlic breadstick, your dinner just became a hearty full meal that will leave you completely satisfied. 

Another perk of pasta is that it's affordable and easy to fix on a tight budget. It can sit in a box in your pantry or the cupboard overnight or for a month and won't go bad. Pop a box of pasta into a pot of boiling water and in no time at all, it'll be ready to slather with sauce and twirl around your fork. It's also exceptionally versatile. You can infuse a plate of pasta with sundried tomatoes, olives, and Parmesan cheese drizzled with a vinaigrette or keep it simple with an Alfredo sauce, bits of broccoli, and chunks of chicken. A plate of whole-grain pasta also offers some health benefits, such as its lower fat content and can help with keeping blood sugar in check. But sometimes, a traditional red sauce smothered across a bed of noodles doesn't sound appetizing. Thank goodness we have alternative recipes for just such a meal!

Fans of fettuccine Alfredo know that the glass jars of sauce available to buy at the grocery store taste nothing like what's served atop noodles at a restaurant. It's disheartening how big the difference there is between the creamy, cheesy Alfredo sauce served at an eatery. Well, now you can have that restaurant-quality Alfredo sauce right at home with this homemade recipe for shrimp Alfredo pasta. All you will need is one pan, 20 minutes and eight ingredients. It's easy to pick up the ingredients at the store, but be sure to purchase 16/20 or 30/40 shrimp, which means there are 16 to 20 shrimp per pound or 30 to 40 shrimp per pound. This recipe uses 30/40 shrimp — and be sure they're fresh and deveined. It'll make the dish taste even better!

If you're wondering what on Earth puttanesca is, it translates to "lady of the night" in Italian. So how did that moniker affix itself to a pasta dish? As history has it, the recipe hails from the mid-20th century in the Spanish Quarters of Naples, a former red-light district, according to Italy Magazine. No matter its colorful and possibly sordid past, this pasta dish is brimming with flavor and will fill you up. 

All you'll need are anchovies, grape tomatoes, kalamata olives, capers, curly parsley, pasta, and seasonings, not to mention olive oil and water for boiling the noodles. The key to infusing this dish with flavor is to bring the ingredients to a boil, then allowing it to simmer to where the pasta soaks up all of the liquid. While pasta puttanesca tastes fantastic fresh, it also works wonderfully as leftovers.

If you love chicken fajitas, you'll love this pasta recipe for chicken fajita pasta that takes the flavors of Southwestern style cooking and morphs it into more of an Italian dish. It takes just five minutes to prep the veggies and 20 minutes to cook. This recipe will be even easier to whip up if you use precooked or canned chicken. When paired with fresh, colorful peppers and a hearty taco seasoning mix, this recipe will quickly become a favorite. All you'll need to do is saute your peppers and the onion, make a thick sauce using vegetable broth and cream, boil the pasta noodles, and add the chicken and shredded cheese. Once the cheese has melted all the way through, this amazing dish is ready to scoop onto your plate and gorge on.

Pasta tastes perfect year-round, but this grilled summer vegetable pasta salad will taste terrific on a cool summer's night while eating al fresco under the stars. Light and savory, this pasta dish calls for an assortment of produce including asparagus, a red bell pepper, summer squash, a zucchini, cherry tomatoes, and a sweet Vidalia onion. 

You can modify the recipe to include your favorite summertime produce if you'd like, of course, whatever you have on hand from the farmer's market or is ripe and ready to pick from the garden works, too. Fire up the grill, prep the veggies, and drizzle them with olive oil. A sprinkle of garlic salt, oregano, and cumin gives this summertime pasta salad some extra zest and zing. It will become a refreshing recipe you turn to quite often during the warm summer months.

If you can't imagine making a homemade Alfredo sauce that rivals what you've dined on in restaurants, guess again. This recipe for fettucine Alfredo whips up a dish that can stand on its own as the main meal or as a side to a fish or meat dish. The secret to this dish is the sauce, which calls for salted butter and heavy cream, along with a hint of nutmeg and pepper. If you're surprised by the addition of nutmeg, don't worry. This spice gives the sauce a bit of a nutty flavor and is commonly used in traditional fettucine Alfredo recipes.