A day well spent playing with pasta dough

There’s been no dearth of fresh eggs in our fridge the past several weeks thanks to our generous neighbors and their healthy henhouse.

This is the first year their 13 chickens have laid and even though they’re a family of six, they evidently have more than enough fresh eggs and have presented us with several dozen. They’re lovely little green and brown gems, with yokes so bright and golden they shimmer like little suns in the frying pan.

As grateful as we are, we found our cache accumulating rapidly, so we took a bold step and committed a day to making homemade pasta — or “homemades” as Jim’s Italian family referred to the noodles his mother routinely made all her adult life, then served not just to her own family but to the entire neighborhood and any shirttail relative that knocked on their door.

Jim’s mom and dad gave us our own “human-powered” pasta machine when we were first married — an anniversary gift we suspect since the gift receipt is still in the original box and is dated in September, the month we wed.

Made in Italy, the stainless steel Marcato is a simple device and making pasta is pretty much the same as playing with Play-Doh — and as much fun.

A couple of weeks ago Jim studied his mother’s pasta recipe, which originally called for “pounds” of flour and eggs; later refigured to about a cup of flour per egg. Mary would make a dozen eggs at a time, which called for not quite four pounds of flour.

Years ago when we raised our own chickens we routinely made our own homemade pasta. Once you’ve tried it you do not want to go back to store-bought.

Naturally, making pasta takes time. Back in the day, we did it just like Mom. We’d dump all the flour onto our large breadboard and hollow out the center. We’d then crack the eggs into the center of the flour, add a couple pinches of salt, a measure of water and mix it together by hand.

This recent pasta-making experience, Jim had to do some calculating to adjust for the diminutive eggs we were working with — a little better than half the size of a typical large egg. He mixed up three batches of silky dough in our KitchenAid (I know, I know … so we cut a little corner) and then we marshaled our forces to begin cranking out ribbons of fat fettuccine.

Hours were consumed as we developed a working rhythm alternating seating and standing duties. By the time we were done, it was going on 6.

The homemade pasta drying rack Pops had made for us years ago was perched atop our countertop with curtains of delicate noodles drying just as dusk appeared outside the windows.

We poured ourselves a glass or wine, took a few pictures to share on WhatsApp with the family, and put on a big pot of water to boil.

As luck would have it we still had some of my homemade sauce — this last batch had been made with Jim and Luke’s homemade sausage from last summer — and sat down to a perfectly blissful, and nostalgic, Sunday dinner.

We left the noodles to dry a full day before boxing them in shirt boxes between layers of tissue paper, just as Mom used to do. We gave a box to our next door neighbors.

And, as with Christmas tree needles after the tree is taken down it seems, I’m still finding little dustings of flour hidden in the kitchen here and there.

Community editor Carol Marino may be reached at 758-4440 or by email at community@dailyinterlake.com.