Twenty five (nearly 26) years ago I was a tourist in West Germany. The country is beautiful the people warm and friendly the food delicious. I didn’t want to leave, but I was running out of time on my visa. The only way to stay was to work. I didn’t speak fluent German so I got a job with the American military.

The job was as bartender at the officer’s club. They had lots of important dignitaries visiting and having parties for. There was a trained chef at the club preparing all kinds of local delicacies. One of her specialties was noodles.

Germans love their starches all kinds of noodles and dumplings included. One of my favorites is Spätzle. I watched chef make them several times. She was so deft at cutting them off the back a plate into the water. I figured heck I can do that. So I invited my new boyfriend for dinner.

This recipe comes from “The German Cookbook” by Mimi Sheraton 1965: 2 ¼ cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, one well beaten egg and ¼ - ¾ cup of water depending on the humidity. The flour and salt are sifted into a bowl, add the egg and mix. Add enough water to make stiff dough. Pat the dough onto the back of a plate. Scrape/slice small pieces into boiling water boil for 5-8 minutes until they float. These can be served right away by pouring hot butter over them, salt, pepper and chopped parsley. She scooped them out with a spider and shocked them in water to stop the cooking and sautéed them later in butter.

After several dates I had discovered that my boyfriend could only order one thing from a menu, Jagerschintzel mit ein grosse pils (veal cutlets in a mushroom sauce with a large pilsner beer.) He seemed to really love this dish so that’s what I decided to cook for him. While Schnitzel and Spätzle are fairly straight forward dishes I had never made them before. I didn’t want to scare him off by feeding him a terrible meal so I thought I’d better practice.

I grew up in a large family and knew how to prepare meats in all different ways. The schnitzel was no problem. The mushroom sauce I figured out, but the noodles gave me fits. The first attempt turned to floured water, the dumplings disappeared right before my eyes. The second time around I over compensated and got tough little pieces of shoe leather. The third time I got gluey globs. I nearly gave up and made dried egg noodles. I was determined though and tried the day of the dinner. They came out perfect, chewy little dumplings that soaked up the sauce and were delicious. He never knew that I worked soooo hard on that dinner. He loved it!

It’s still my husband’s favorite dish. We were married a year later.

My first experience of making pasta was in 2003 while I was on a school exchange program in Italy. I was a 15 year old, (Italian) boy crazed, teenage girl able to run loose and free in the little mountain village on the Eastern coast where I lived with my best friend and our host family.

My host mother was an amazingly svelte, stunning woman who had the greatest cooking abilities I have come across. Before settleing down and having kids, she worked as a pastry chef in numerous restaurants and hotels around Europe. I got to appreciate her delicious apple pies, pizza, tarts, cakes and especially pasta.

On one of the few days that I wasn't either at school or with the "locals" she had invited me to learn to make pasta. There was no pasta machine involved. Just hands and a lot of love (and opera music playing very loudly in the background.) Her 4 year old son insisted on helping us (which resulted in flour all over the house) but the process and the result was such a unique and memorable experience I will never forget. The pasta was incredible!! Some of the greatest I have ever tasteted (and I have eaten a lot of pasta!!) It resulted in me gaining quite a lot of weight but I do not regret it at all.

No funny stories, just a very special memory with my Italian "Mama" that I will never forget (and a wonderful home made recipe hidden in a cookbook.)

Here is what is strange... I JUST signed up for Daring Bakers yesterday, after almost a year of reading other blogs ambitiously approach the challenges each month. Before I signed up, I looked at the past challenges, and was shocked to learn that April's challenge is something I just made myself a couple of weeks ago: “Lasagne Verdi al Forno,” a recipe from my favorite magazine, Saveur. My only regret is that I did not take any photos of my finished product, for surely I should have.

Making the pasta for the Lasagne was a task I had never approached, much less making ANY sort of pasta before. It is to my shame too for I am half pure Italian blood! In addition, for my last birthday, my dad gave me a pasta machine, especially made in Italy! Now almost 8 months later I finally get the guts to use it.

On Thursday, I made the ragu, and being pregnant, I had to put it away and not think about making lasagna for a while, for the smell of all that beef and fat made me want to hurl.

On Friday, I finally pulled out the brand new pasta machine, only to discover that it is quite small, less than a foot across. It seems my dad thought I couldn't handle the big size machine? This, I later learned makes all the difference. If you’re going to invest in a pasta machine, go for the big one. There are several parts to the machine, and while setting it up, I soon learned that my countertop will not accommodate the clamp to hold it down and in place. So, I thought I could just do without it and use an oven mitt to keep it from moving-- kind of the same concept of a wet towel under a cutting board, right? Wrong. The thing actually moved all over the place when cranked!

So, I set out to make the actual spinach pasta. Saveur has a nice photo collection of the step by step process; however, my steps didn't look anything like their steps. First of all, they say two bunches of spinach, but really what the heck does that amount to? Second, after I added the wilted and squeezed fresh spinach, my color was TOTALLY wrong. It was splotchy and looked a bit like vomit. And once I added all of my spinach, I had to add GOBS more flour for it was extremely sticky. I wondered at the time if I should add another egg to make up for all the flour so that the texture was right. But once the pasta dough has been kneaded, how in the world could you possibly add another slimy egg?

Once I got the dough to a stage where I thought it would make it through the pasta machine, I attempted to get it through. This is actually a VERY difficult task. First you have to hold the dough upright- letting it rest along your forearm, and then you have to crank, and with mine, you had to keep the machine in place. And then you had to make sure the sides of the dough didn't get stuck in the sides of the machine, or they'd catch and make the result torn and lopsided. What a circus act!

After three hours working on one recipe of pasta dough, I had learned that you can mess up the dough sorely but can always reknead it to a ball and start over. In addition, I learned that you can cut a longer version made on a larger setting and then run it through a smaller setting much easier. In the end I had probably 10 pasta sheets of semi-thin quality and of all shapes and sizes. Little did I know that rekneading it likely made it more rubbery… yum, rubbery pasta!

Covered in flour, I reread the recipe. I now learn that you have to boil the pasta sheets for a few seconds and plunge them in an ice-water bath them to stop cooking. Parboiling is nothing new to me, but still sounded like a pain. By this time, my pregnant self was ready to give up. It was already 8pm and there was no lasagna in site. However, I pushed through, if only for the sake of my husband who kept coming in to see if I needed any help and tasting the ragu, which was now reheating on the stove.

Now having my ragu hot on the stove, and having made a somewhat clumpy béchamel sauce, I boiled some water and prepared my water bath. The slimy booger-looking pasta that came out of the water was so unappetizing that I seriously considered chucking it and using the No Boil dry pasta in the pantry. However, determined still, I began to assemble my armature lasagna. Upon assembling the lasagna, I found that I was a whole layer short of pasta pieces. I figured it’s just a blob of flavor anyway and no one will miss a layer… right?

After the lasagna came out of the oven, I found that the pasta was extremely soft, in kind of a disturbing melt in your mouth way. And the flavor of it, even with all that extra spinach, hardly stood up to the ragu. I found that I prefer the chewier kind where to you can bite into the pasta.

Next time I make pasta, I will make regular noodles of some sort and dry them and all that. Hopefully it will be a chewier and a less messy experience. Practice makes perfect right?

My parents have been making pasta for as long as I remember with a trusty hand-crank pasta maker. My dad, the type of person who makes dishes based on Iron Chef and tries anything, has made a whole slew of fancy pastas, even ravioli with whole egg yolks inside. But me? As much as I liked eating it, I never actually made it with my family.

For my 16th birthday last year, I had been pining for something super sweet with cute dresses and lots of balloons. But my birthday came and went, and I was disappointed that I hadn't done anything more memorable. A week after my actual birthday, on a whim, I decided to invite my two best friends over for dinner. When I asked my dad to prepare some special spaghetti, he said, "Why don't you make that the party?"

The three of us had never made pasta before. We all put on mismatched aprons and cleaned the dinner table before making the pasta right on it. At first we were hesitant to dump out the flour (right on the table!) or crack the eggs (what if the wells leaked?) but before long we were having a great time. My dad showed us how to bring the dough together and, gradually, thin it out with the pasta machine. He refused to do it for us, despite our uncertainty, and we began to develop a feel for the spaghetti.

The whole process took several hours from start to finish. We began with four small balls of dough and by the end, the table was draped in wide, whisper-thin sheets of pasta. We talked the whole time as we learned together and I must admit... having my father there with my two best friends wasn't awkward like I'd imagined. We talked about everything from cannibalism to game theory to the Seattle Mariners as we rolled out and floured our individual pastas. I felt so proud of my father for being so cool (okay, maybe relieved!), or my friends, for being mature enough to hold intelligent conversation. By the end of dinner, the four of us felt pretty close!

Each of us made a different pasta. My father's was a pink linguine, colored with beet, that was eventually served with a cream sauce. Ellie's was a simple spaghetti, colored deep squash-yellow with a healthy dose of turmeric, and served with fresh tomato sauce. My friend Andy, who had never so much as baked cake from a box, was incredibly proud of his spinach pasta (how very DB of him!) Finally, my pasta - plain with fresh herbs rolled in - was cut into squares, filled with leftover birthday mashed potatoes, and tossed in butter.

Looking back, it's one of the sweetest memories I have with my two friends and my family. It wasn't the flashy, glamorous sweet 16 I'd dreamed of, but it was intimate and memorable... and delicious.

I don't think I've ever had a simpler, or more unforgettable birthday.

(From closest to furthest away: Ellie's turmeric spaghetti, Dad's beet-pink linguine, Andy's spinach pasta, and finally - it's a bit faint - my herbed ravioli dough.)

The first time I made pasta was when I was in high school. I saw Mario Batali do it in his show and think looks easy so i gave it a try....

It look so cool when he just mound the flour on the table and just work in the eggs with his fingers and knead it by hand. No mess no fuss!

Well, of course mine turned our quite messy and very glutenous but then I had a great time making it. Taste good too!

for the life of me, at the time didn't know what i did wrong. Try as I might, I couldn't roll out thin sheets of pasta, didn't have a pasta machine so I used rolling pin. I just kept rolling and rolling the the pasta dough just kept bouncing back. After few minutes of frustrated rolling. With the help of our cook, we just cooked the pasta in sheets and used it for lasagna, it was on a thicker side than the normal store bought kind but I have to saw it tasted good. Much softer than using the store bought dry lasagna sheets.

My first time making homemade pasta was when I at 23 had move to another part of the country - since the country is Denmark - the move was only about a 3 hours drive - but you know; leaving friends and family, starting your first job as a teacher - you miss familiar people. Well a longtime friend of mine asked if she could come visit and I was absolutely thrilled. Looking forward to seeing her again and looking forward to talking about mutual friends and of course our mutual passion; food. Now, she and I finished our teacher's education at the same time only her main subject was home economics. So I assumed that a relevant topic would be food. Now, what to serve a home economics teacher? Homemade ravioli filled with ricotta and spinach and served with rosemary butter sauce was my answer to that. It seemed to be the right sort of exotic choice to get us talking again.

I tried a couple of times before hand where the outcome was nowhere near good enough; the dough was too moist, the ravioli was too big or everything just fell apart during cooking. Finally I succeed, or at least was satisfied with the result. The big day arrived; it was to be a dinner full of applause and satisfaction. Or so I thought! She did not comment on the beautiful garnished plates (helloooo, can't you see I made an effort?)nor did she comment on the tastes of the ravioli and sauce (I was kind of looking for standing ovation at that time). She thanked me for dinner and asked well what's for dessert then? Now don't get this wrong; she really is a nice girl and she is still a good friend of mine. But you just don't serve that kind of food (what ever kind homemade ravioli may be:-) to someone who prefers meat and gravy for dinner. So lesson learnt: Lesson no. 1: Homemade pasta requires (at least if you're looking for applause) a homemade pasta person as guest:-) Lesson no. 2: If you're looking for praise give your guest a heads up first.

I have yet to make my own pasta. well I did try my hand at gnocchi. That is sort of pasta. I had a gnocchi fail. It was sort of alright, but really didn't stick together all that well. Kind of a bummer. I have not been a big pasta person but lately have been enjoying eating it a bit more than before. I am always told that fresh pasta would convert me into a pasta lover. We'll see.

My first time making pasta was with the Daring Bakers. I read and re-read the recipe and watched the youtube videos countless times, awed at how kneading and rolling just a mere three ingredients could make pasta. I finally gathered all the ingredients and tried the spinach pasta recipe. I thought it would never come together- i had to stand on top of a stool to use my weight to push down on it and knead it together. It took me about half an hour and finally i had a beautiful smooth ball of dough. I left it to rest and came back to it hours later. As a college student, I live in a small apartment so in order to dry the pasta sheets i turned all of our dining room chairs on their sides, sanitized them and used them as the drying racks. I spent about half an hour kneading the dough out and setting it out to dry. The next day I made the bechemal and ragu sauce which i was very proud of because i had never made a home made ragu sauce[and the fact that this lasagna was literally completely from scratch]. I simmered it for the hours required and everything was finally ready! I carefully cooked the pasta sheets and laid them out to dry- it was so fascinating how i was cooking pasta that i made from SCRATCH [I never imagined even wanting to make hand made pasta!]. As i was cooking the pasta, my mom was talking to me on the phone telling me that she had recently tried fresh pasta at a market and how amazing it was. This made me even more excited. I decided to serve the lasagna to a few friends who were over, one of which was a vegetarian. I carefully layered the pasta, bechemal, and ragu sauce in about 7/8 of the pan and made 1/8 of it with a plain tomato sauce for my vegetarian friend. This was a very tedious task. I was finally finished and i grabbed a piece of foil to cover the pan with. As i was moving the pasta to the edge of the counter, i thought to myself, 'wow, this is really heavy, i should ask for some help'. As i was attempting to cover the pan in foil, one of the worst moments of my cooking history happened…the pan fell. To the floor. CRASH!!!! Resulting in my small apartment kitchen floor to turn into a giant puddle of lasagna. I think I wanted to scream, cry and just sit there and cry. I stared at the hours of work that was now all jumbled together in a big gooey mess and berated myself for NOT asking for the help I should have when I thought to myself that the pan was heavy. I stood and stared. My boyfriend slowly came to me, knowing that although he couldn’t understand how devastating this was, it was one of the few times that he saw me so sad and defeated. We slowly cleaned up the mess and I think I was silent the entire time. I could not stop thinking about the moment it fell, wanting to rewind time SO badly. There were still hungry tummies though, so we went to soup plantation, I ate my heart out, and to this day I still cannot look at lasagna without feeling the pain of that dish. One day I will gather up the courage to attempt pasta again because I know it must be absolutely amazing but that’s later…when I can forget my pasta trauma!

Technically, this is not the first time I made home made pasta but it is the first time I made home made pasta after attending a wonderful cooking course in in Tuscany.

A couple of years ago I decided to make my husband his favourite pasta dish - Lasagna with Spinach and Ricotta for Father's Day. I was so in the 'pasta zone' having just come back from a cooking course in Tuscany. It wasn't the first time I made this dish so everything should have turned out just dandy!

No problem making the spinach and ricotta filling - let's move on to the home made pasta dough. Get out the handy dandy KA pasta attachment and start rolling out the lasagna. I was so proud of how 'thin' my pasta dough turned out - just like we made in Tuscany. Now, don't ask what forces of the universe invaded my brain, but since the pasta dough was thin, I decided not to cook it before layering the lasagna!

When I served the lasagna at lunch the next day, my husband looked up at me and asked, 'where's the lasagna?'. What? After careful inspection, we noticed that the lasagna noodles has disintegrated into the filling while baking in the oven! I still can't live that episode down. My family calls it 'The Unsolved Case of the Missing Lasagna'. Now everytime I make lasagna, I hear snickering in the background. Well folks, live and learn I say.

This is perfect timing! I just made homemade pasta for the first time about a week and a half ago, when I was cooking dinner for my boyfriend. I decided to be a little ambitious, and tried to make spinach pasta. Well my first attempt was a bit of a disaster. The added moisture from the spinach (although I drained it and dried it for an hour!) made the dough extremely sticky, no matter how much flour I added. Every time I tried to roll it through the machine, it would get stuck and fall apart. After wasting a lot of time on this dough, I eventually gave up. But I was very determined to make homemade pasta (especially since I told my boyfriend that it was going to be included in the dinner), so I tried again with plain basic pasta. I had just cleaned the food processor, so I attempted to mix it by hand, using the "volcano method." I probably should have stuck with the food processor, since I had a few attempted escapes of the eggs out of the flour volcano! At this point I still had a couple of hours until my boyfriend was coming, so I decided to roll the sheets through the machine, and cut them into fettuccine noodles. I was so excited when the dough actually went through and made noodles. I have watched my dad make pasta many times before, so I made sure I tossed the cut noodles with cornmeal and carefully laid them out on a sheet. An hour or so later, when I went to check on the noodles, I saw that they had all stuck together in a congealed mess! I tried to re-roll some of the dough, but the added cornmeal gave it a strange texture. Thank goodness I still had about half the dough saved in the fridge!

Although this first attempt was a bit of a disaster, the end results were delicious, and I will definitely be making homemade pasta again! I am still determined to make some type of flavored pasta, so hopefully I will find a better recipe for that.