Pasta, pasta 

Once you've eaten fresh pasta, it's hard to buy that dried-up stuff in the grocery stores. Even if you mess it up like my mother and I did when we made it on Christmas day. The ingredients are so simple: eggs, water, flour, and salt (you can Google recipes), but we were first-timers. It was a mess all over my kitchen. Flour on the counter, on the floor, on my apron, in my hair—I always get stuff in my hair. The dough was too sticky, but we pushed on through. Cutting the dough into smaller, more manageable pieces, we rolled it through the pasta maker my mom's parents brought her from Iran long ago. Over and over again, we cranked the rollers, making the dough thin enough to move it over to the cutters. But our dough wasn't dry enough to cut, so I just kept adding flour and running it through over and over again until we had a pile of very uneven noodles sitting on the counter. My mom was doing her own thing, and I was doing mine. We were both trying to tell each other what to do, even though it was pretty obvious that neither one of us knew what we were doing. Then, we just threw it all into a pot of water and the noodles bubbled up all funny. So we didn't read our Google recipe very thoroughly—which is normal for us. We like to wing it in my family. Apparently, we were supposed to dry them before plopping them in water. But winging it usually always tastes good and so did these noodles (They were so soft and delicious!), especially after we added them to the leftover cioppino (Googled that one, too) I'd made the night before. Nailed it!

Google "fresh pasta recipe" and do it yourself—at your house with friends, because cooking with friends is better than cooking alone! Δ

Editor Camillia Lanham needs her mom to bring the pasta roller back to the house. Send fresh ideas her way at [email protected].