Everybody loves pasta—but not if it’s made the same way night after night. Families with kids, especially, eat loads of pasta, but it’s awfully easy to get stuck in a “red-sauce rut,” eating one version or another of marinara sauce over and over again.

Enter author Allan Bay, an ex-pat who lives in Rome and has written some of Italy’s best-selling cookbooks. Bay opens up in these pages a big, bold new world of pasta sauces, some from the classic Italian repertoire, other brilliant new creations of his own.

They have all sorts of main ingredients, from beef and chicken to shrimp and clams to glorious veggies from artichokes to zucchini. All of the sauces are easy to prepare and everyone cooks up fast. (more…)