I Love Pasta!

Although titled "I love pasta", this story starts with Chinese noodles.  You see, I have memories from my childhood of using a pasta machine to make Chinese noodles with my parents.  My mum would make the noodle dough while dad would help us kids to roll and cut the dough into noodles with our handy dandy pasta machine which they apparently brought all the way from Singapore to Australia (are you confused yet).  And then when all the noodles were made, my mum would cook us a delicious noodle dish for lunch or dinner!  Now I LOVE noodles and I LOVE pasta, so I decided last year that it was about time I tried making my own pasta with the "help" of my cheeky monkeys.

My faithful pasta machine cranking out the spinach lasagne sheets.

Since my parents were no longer using their pasta machine for pasta or noodles, they passed it to me to bring it back out of retirement, so to speak.  The cheeky monkeys have absolutely enjoyed our attempts at making pasta so far.  Being me, I was not content to make just plain pasta, it had to be flavoured, so we've made herb pasta (using herbs from our garden) as well as pumpkin pasta (which nobody liked, even me, the pumpkin lover).  And this week we made spinach pasta (using store bought frozen spinach) which I turned into lasagne!  Now, at this point my dad would have made some comment about how the Italians got the idea for pasta from the Chinese, but I digress...

 

The lasagne - you can see the layers of green pasta if you squint!

 I have to say that, although I was absolutely exhausted after my mammoth day of pasta and lasagne making, it was really fun making this dish pretty much completely from scratch (it's not completely from scratch since I didn't make the cheese myself or grow the vegetables...).  There's something nice about not eating plain old regular pasta (yes, I get bored easily so like a little bit of excitement in my meals, LOL) and, as you can see below, it certainly helps the cheeky monkeys to eat their meals better (well, faster, at least) when they've helped to make it!

 

The cheeky monkeys enjoying their dinner.