Playdough or pasta?

These long winter afternoons are the perfect excuse to get back to my much-ignored blog. The girls and I have been making just as much mess in the kitchen, but somehow the photographs and writing seemed to get put on hold as the chaos of Christmas took over. Why do we do it to ourselves? I only just feel like I've recovered from the annual stress-fest. If I'm really honest, I don't enjoy Christmas as much now that I have children. Not until the day arrives, when the last present is wrapped, the last homemade, glittery and still sticky card delivered, and I can finally sit back and enjoy my children enjoying Christmas. I shouldn't be complaining as this year I didn't even have to do the cooking as my lovely friend Tors invited us, along with my Mother-In-Law, for Christmas Day. She cooked up a storm, and I bought along a few puddings, including a chocolate log which took me 3 attempts to get right ( I think the last time I made anything similar was a swiss roll at school, which I found equally tricky).

I thought I'd start off my 2011 blogging with something much simpler - homemade pasta. I couldn't have told you what was in pasta until I first made it with a group of children and realised just how easy it is to make.  Plain egg pasta is made from 2 ingredients, flour and eggs.  Much quicker to make than homemade playdough, twice as tasty and not nearly so messy. If your children are anything like mine pasta is a regular visitor to your table, so making your own is well worthwhile.

1. Weigh out 100g flour with your child (this amount will serve 2 children for lunch). I use Doves Farm Pasta Flour, but plain white flour will do the job.

2. Help your child to break 1 egg into a small bowl.

3. Get your child to scoop out a well in the flour.

4. Let your child pour the egg into the well. Ask them to start stirring, and the dough will start to look like big breadcrumbs.

5. Gather the dough together and give it a quick knead, then hand it over to your child and let them have a go at kneading.

6. If you get into making pasta it is well worth buying a pasta machine, the one in the photographs I bought for my husband as a not very subtle hint last year - it worked, he's made us some great pasta.  However there is no need for a machine.  For tagliettelle simply roll out the dough with your child, as thin as you can, fold over, then roll again. Once you have got it nice and thin, cut it into long strips. It doesn't matter what it looks like, it matter how it tastes, and it will be delicious - especially with the homemade pesto I wrote about last year on the blog.

7. You can hang the pasta to dry it, I had to keep ours up high  as the children kept coming along and trying to steal it to eat raw. I'll never see what children see in raw pasta, mine happily crunch away on the packet stuff like its a bag of crisps.