Tomato Sauce

Norristown-raised actress Maria Bello shares her mother's recipes with her friends. And at age 68, Kathy Bello seems to have embarked on yet another career. She's the author of a self-published cookbook, Aunt Kath's Kitchen: Cooking with Passion and Love for Family and Friends (available through auntkathskitchen.com ) and is 40 recipes in to what could become her next. "My mother has always gathered people, cousins, friends, family, around the table and had conversations.

My mom and dad came from Puerto Rico to stay with us after the birth of each of our sons. One of the best gifts they gave us during those weeks was to cook for us. They cooked many things, but most important, they cooked Puerto Rican rice and beans — the best comfort food for exhausted new parents. In our family, my mom, Michelle, makes the rice, and my dad, Ernesto, makes the beans. Mama takes pride in the perfect consistency of her rice: not too dry, not too oily, with just enough salt and a bit of "stuck rice" at the bottom of the pan for the crunchy-rice lovers.

In Italy, cooks have produced an endless variety of pasta forms and preparation techniques with delightful results. The larger style pastas provide the foundation for many interesting variations. Combining cooked pasta with other ingredients in a baking dish, heated in an oven, creates dishes often described as pasta al forno. One of the best-known of these dishes is lasagna, which varies in style from region to region. In the United States, lasagna dishes are synonymous with hearty casseroles, layered with wide noodles, a rich cheese filling and tomato sauce.

Think vegetarian cuisine is nothing but tofu stir-fry and rice and beans? Not so. Creating a gourmet vegetarian meal that satisfies and delights the senses need be limited only by your imagination. With ingredients now available in mainstream markets, it's easy to serve cuisine that is low in fat, high in fiber, rich in phytochemicals, and cholesterol-free. Many of these ingredients are new and traditional soy foods that offer the health-conscious cook an opportunity to re-create favorite dishes within a low-fat, cholesterol-free framework.

Time seems to have stood still at the Red Lion Inn; indeed, little has changed over the years at this popular Burlington County restaurant - not the home-cooked pasta dishes, the country-cozy setting or the informal service. The restaurant is just off the Red Lion Circle in Vincentown, on the edge of the Medford area's rapid urbanization; four miles south on Route 206 is its opposite number - the trendy, ultra-contemporary Tabernacle Inn with charming yuppie cuisine. In many ways, the Red Lion is comfortably old-fashioned; its large dining room glistens in mellowed oak paneling, with cluster chandeliers with tinted globe lamps centered between rough-finished ceiling beams, and large picture windows masked with pleated sheers and framed with a valance and jabot swags in pretty country-red print fabric.

For many of us, Indian summer is the best time to visit the Jersey Shore: The temperatures and ocean are still warm and, best of all for restaurant- goers, the summer crowds are long gone. So now is an excellent time to visit Via Veneto, a splendid southern Italian restaurant in Linwood where everything is home-cooked to order; approaching its two-year anniversary in the Central Square shopping center on Route 9 between Atlantic City and Ocean City, the friendly, informal restaurant is open year-round.

The escargot might have crept out of the restaurant's name: Bistro L'Escargot, on Fifth Street near South, became simply Bistro about six months ago. But the new management wisely has kept the delicious critter on its menu. This cordial cafe offers a laid-back change of pace from formal dining, yet handles its chores seriously and honestly. It offers reasonably priced food from individual pizzas to pastas and select entrees. The new menu is similar to its predecessor - a dish or two missing; a new one added.

Riding the boom in Italian restaurants that is sweeping South Jersey, Filomena Cucina Italiana has quickly become a fine place for good, home-cooked southern Italian cuisine. The small, attractively decorated restaurant opened several months ago in the Commerce Plaza I shopping center in Clementon with pleasant dishes at affordable prices. The mirrored dining room is decorated in a warm, vaguely Art Deco style. Ocean-green booths are spacious and comfortable, while tables with chocolate- colored covers are set with white cotton napkins, an oil-fed wick with hurricane shade and a bouquet of baby's breath and both white and beet-red carnations.

Stunning, ultra-modern decor and hearty Italian cuisine are the enviable hallmarks of the new Marcello restaurant in Chesterbrook. Marcello was opened four months ago by three brothers who operated two previous restaurants under the name Tre Fratelli - one in Newtown, the other just a few doors away from their new place in the Chesterbrook Village Center. Tre Fratelli in Chesterbrook was closed a couple of years ago and, while the Newtown place still operates under the same name, it has new owners, permitting the brothers to focus all their efforts on Marcello.

Few places in the world treat vegetables and grains with the great respect and variety that France's Provence and Italy's Piedmont do. Cooks of these two regions prepare both dietary staples in similar styles and give them a direct and uncomplicated clarity of flavor. Not surprisingly, the similarities are most marked in the cooking of Nice, which has been part of France only since 1860. Except for occupations by France under Louis XIV and 20 years under Napoleon, Nice belonged to the house of Savoy for five centuries and was part of the kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia.

My mom and dad came from Puerto Rico to stay with us after the birth of each of our sons. One of the best gifts they gave us during those weeks was to cook for us. They cooked many things, but most important, they cooked Puerto Rican rice and beans — the best comfort food for exhausted new parents. In our family, my mom, Michelle, makes the rice, and my dad, Ernesto, makes the beans. Mama takes pride in the perfect consistency of her rice: not too dry, not too oily, with just enough salt and a bit of "stuck rice" at the bottom of the pan for the crunchy-rice lovers.

Norristown-raised actress Maria Bello shares her mother's recipes with her friends. And at age 68, Kathy Bello seems to have embarked on yet another career. She's the author of a self-published cookbook, Aunt Kath's Kitchen: Cooking with Passion and Love for Family and Friends (available through auntkathskitchen.com ) and is 40 recipes in to what could become her next. "My mother has always gathered people, cousins, friends, family, around the table and had conversations.

We were a Ragu family. That is, we were until my mother saw a commercial in which a man held up a jar of Prego and said, "The first ingredient in Prego is tomatoes," then held up a jar of Ragu and said, "The first ingredient in Ragu is water. " My mother switched her loyalty the next day. The jarred sauces of today are a far cry from those of my youth. The first ingredient in most jars now (including Ragu) is tomatoes, and gone are the lengthy lists of chemical ingredients and several different types of sugar.

These are the questions that have dogged me during these dog days of summer: Is it better to make tomato sauce in a skillet or a stockpot? Should the tomatoes be peeled and seeded first, or simmered intact? Do carrots and celery belong in a true marinara? Is it overkill to add meat? Butter or olive oil? Can this sweet but pulpy fruit really be transformed into the velvety glory of the Italian table in just 30 minutes, or must it bubble lazily for hours? If I had an Italian grandmother, the answers would no doubt be encoded in my DNA. Perhaps if I had married into an Italian family, I might at least have access to an unimpeachable source.

What it is: The Hoagie Works in Doylestown Borough. What we like about it: It's summertime, so it's muscle-shirt time again for Fred Carfagno. The owner of the Hoagie Works is the principal attraction at the State Street salad-and-sandwich shop - a one-block walk down one of the town's many alleys for those who work at the Bucks County Courthouse. Fred seems to know most customers ("What'll it be today, Judge?"), and while you wait for your takeout, it's free theater to watch him turn on the charm for the girls and the women.

Hunting for a party dish that's elegant yet comfortably familiar and lighthearted, impressive but not hard to make? Try this upscale remake of the popular Italian restaurant specialty chicken cacciatore ("hunter's-style chicken"). There are many regional versions, but in this innovative one, roasted Cornish hens replace the usual sauteed chicken pieces. The brandy-flamed mushroom and tomato sauce is prepared at the last minute for a fresh-tasting dish. Cornish hens that have never been frozen will produce the best results.

A diet rich in tomato sauce . . . and other tomato-based products . . . can lower the risk of prostate cancer, a new study says. - Associated Press Red gravy is concentrated, molten Italian-ness, a soulful symbol of family, identity, memory and mom. It's not fancy. In fact, tangy, spicy, satisfying tomato sauce - it's gravy here in the East, sauce nearly everywhere else - is dismissed as common and unsophisticated, especially as restaurant fare. But to Italian Americans, there's mojo in the boiling pot. "I think it is at the heart of what it means to be Italian in America," said food anthropologist Paola Sensi-Isolani of St. Mary's College of California in Moraga.

In Italy, cooks have produced an endless variety of pasta forms and preparation techniques with delightful results. The larger style pastas provide the foundation for many interesting variations. Combining cooked pasta with other ingredients in a baking dish, heated in an oven, creates dishes often described as pasta al forno. One of the best-known of these dishes is lasagna, which varies in style from region to region. In the United States, lasagna dishes are synonymous with hearty casseroles, layered with wide noodles, a rich cheese filling and tomato sauce.

One of the first American pasta factories was established in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1848. In its early days, most Americans referred to pasta as macaroni, and it was traditionally considered a homey, blue-collar meal. By the 1960s and '70s, what we were calling macaroni and spaghetti morphed into pasta - and suddenly there was a huge number of shapes and a variety of colors. But whatever the shape or color, essentially the same equipment is used: The dough passes through machines that extrude it through dies - metal disks pierced with holes - that determine the final shape.

When it comes to food, few restaurants can match the scrumptious dishes at Fellini Cafe Trattoria in Newtown Square. But service at the tiny, overcrowded strip-shopping-center restaurant can be more hilarious than an Abbott and Costello movie, proving that there's more to a restaurant than just food. Fellini opened in late November as a larger but otherwise almost exact duplication of the restaurant with the same name and menu in Ardmore. The new place is always crowded, I was told, and I believe it. The night I visited, dozens of people waited on the sidewalk for up to an hour for a table.