Giada De Laurentiis's Brilliant Use for Those Random Bits of Pasta Left at the Bottom of the Box

True, Giada De Laurentiis wrote a healthy lifestyle-focused cookbook — Eat Good, Feel Better — last year. But that doesn't mean that pasta is off the menu for the 51-year-old Italian-American chef, restaurateur, mom, and TV star.

"I think that is the mentality that we have: 'I'm going to go on a diet.' Well, most of the time, for most people, that means, 'I'm going to deprive myself of all the things that I love.' Well what happens psychologically? That's all you think about 24/7. I can't wait to have that piece of candy. I can't wait to have that plate of pasta," De Laurentiis said in her March 2021 interview on the Allrecipes Homemade Podcast. "So why don't we just have it the way that I grew up, which is small amounts?"

Everything in moderation is a mantra we can totally live by, especially if it's related to carbs (something we could never live without!). But if we practice portion control by cooking up half a box, for example, instead of the full one, what's a home cook with a small pantry to do with several partially-full boxes of dry pasta?

Kitchen Clean-Out Cheesy Baked Pasta, De Laurentiis recommends!

In her Instagram demonstration, the chef begins with three steps:

• Boil a pot of water to cook farfalle and rigatoni (or whatever leftover pasta you like)
• Saute turkey sausage (or your preferred meat or plant-based meat substitute) with garlic
• Mix ricotta into pomodoro sauce for a makeshift creamy red sauce

"I wanted to make lasagna, but I didn't have spinach, and I didn't have lasagna sheets, so I decided, 'the heck with it, we're going to make baked pasta instead,'" De Laurentiis says in her how-to video.

Toss the al dente pasta into the sauce, keeping the pasta water handy in case you'd like to add a splash to thin out the sauce. ("The starches from the pasta water are the secret to really every pasta," De Laurentiis explained on Homemade.)

Stir in the cooked protein. Add fresh basil, cubed provolone cheese, shredded mozzarella cheese ("great for melting"), shredded Cheddar ("something a little bit sharp"), grated Parmigiano cheese, and garlic powder. Transfer to a large baking dish, and top the pasta mixture with bread crumbs plus more grated Parmigiano and cubed provolone cheese. Drizzle with olive oil ("to make it nice and golden brown, or you could do butter if you wanted") and bake for 500 degrees F (260 degrees C) until bubbly and brown on top.

Don't feel limited to these ingredients, though. De Laurentiis confirms you can use any pasta, cheese, or meat you have on hand!

"Have you ever had a few different boxes of pasta hanging out in the pantry, all with just a little bit left, and decided to throw them all together in one dish? It might have felt like you were breaking an unsaid Italian rule of mixing pasta, but in reality, there's nothing more Italian than using up all your odds and ends to reduce waste and make a good meal out of it," De Laurentiis says in a post on her blog, Giadzy.

This practice even has a name, "pasta mista," or "mixed pasta." It originates in Naples where some pasta factories actually sell boxes of a mishmash pasta cuts that didn't fit into their boxes.

"Our favorite pasta factory in Italy, Setaro, offers a particularly fun bag of pasta mista with a wide variety of pasta leftovers like manfredi lunghi and strozzapreti," she says.

Related Content:

• 7 Fun Ways to Use Up Leftover Spaghetti