There are plenty of easy and delicious weeknight dinner recipes that can feed your whole family in a short amount of time—and maybe even a steady rotation that everyone likes. (Sheet pan suppers, looking at you!) But it’s hard to beat the magic of pasta.
Pasta dinners can have so much variety in flavor, texture, ingredients, and can also be a quick fix for when you have a lot of leftover ingredients in the fridge that you need to use up. (In our house, I call this ever-changing recipe “Kitchen Sink Pasta.”) There are a few all-time favorite Southern pasta recipes, like our Best-Ever Homemade Macaroni and Cheese, which foster nostalgia and comfort. And then we also have elevated company-worthy dinner pastas, like our Lemon Chicken Pasta, that are impressive and bring people together.
When you’re craving pasta and you’d prefer to let the pros handle it, our friends at Olive Garden have your back. But going out to dinner doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to blow your budget. Though it seems like restaurant costs rise with each season, there’s one thing you can rely on to stay the same: Olive Garden’s Never Ending Pasta Bowl is back, and, for the fourth year in a row, it’s still just $13.99.
If you’re not familiar with the Never Ending Pasta Bowl, you’re in for a treat. This satisfying and well-rounded meal comes with unlimited soup or salad, endless fresh-baked breadsticks, and all-you-can-eat pasta.
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Olive Garden
The pasta-bilities return from August 25 to November 16, with up to 96 possible flavor combinations. Plus, new for this year, Olive Garden announced that they’re bringing the heat with the Spicy Three-Meat Sauce—a blend of chili flakes, cherry peppers, red bell pepper, pepperoni, red wine, garlic, and herbs added to a homemade meat sauce.
Here’s the Never Ending Pasta Bowl breakdown:
Pasta Options: Fettuccine, Spaghetti, Angel Hair, RigatoniHomemade Sauce Options: Spicy Three-Meat Sauce, Alfredo, Meat Sauce, Five Cheese Marinara, Traditional Marinara, Creamy MushroomAdd-On Toppings ($4.99 each): Crispy Chicken Fritta, Meatballs, Italian Sausage
If you’re a member of Olive Garden’s eClub, you can actually enjoy the Never Ending Pasta Bowl a week early, starting Monday, August 18. You won’t want to miss this special budget-friendly celebration, even if you missed the chain’s iconic (now sold-out) noodle-shaped pool floaties this summer.
In addition, in early July, Olive Garden announced a new Bucatini pasta option on their menu—a thick spaghetti with a hollow center that allows pasta to soak up sauce from the inside out. (It’s the first time in nearly seven years that they’ve added a new pasta shape to their menu!) You can only snag this pasta shape—and its mouth-watering application in the Calabrian Steak and Shrimp Bucatini—through August 25.
Delicious, family-friendly, filling, and affordable? Sounds like a great fit for your dinner menu.
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