What that means is 3 cups of pasta measured after you have boiled it. It does NOT mean to measure it out THEN cook it.
Check the recipe procedure to see when the pasta is added to the ingredients. Is it added to existing liquid? If not, then it generally would mean to add already cooked pasta.
Basic ingredients are the main ingredients you need. For example one of the basic ingredients for a pasta recipe is the pasta itself. Without it, you can't make a pasta dish.
cassoulet is a French recipe for cooked beans with meat.
'coq au vin' is a recipe involving a "rooster cooked in wine"
That is an Italian cooking term, 'al dente' meaning pasta that is cooked firm, but not hard. perfectly how you would enjoy it.
The phrase used to say good bite in cooking terms is al denté,this is especially true when cooking pasta,the texture of cooked pasta is al denté .
'Al dente' means cook until there is a little resistance to biting. It means 'to the tooth' and it is how connoisseurs like gnocchi and pasta cooked.
Spirals,corkscrew pasta.
If you mean pasta shapes, there are hundreds.
You mean Fusilli which is corkscrew shaped pasta
"Milk, divided" or any "ingredient, divided" means that the ingredient will be split up and used in two different steps in the recipe. ie. 5 cups milk, divided might mean 2 cups are used right off in step 1 and the remaining three cups added in step 7.
Al dente is a cooking term. It refers to cooking a food so that it is cooked, yet still a bit firm when you bite into it. This term is often used for cooking pasta.