Homemade Pasta with the kids!

Every time we have a new baby in the house, we seem to spend much of the first few weeks at home. Coming up with fun at-home activities for the other kids is very important to us. We don't want any jealousy and any parent knows that a kid with nothing to do is NEVER a good thing!

Our last go-around involved homemade pizza. It was a great way to get the older kids involved in something and make them feel special despite a new baby getting all the attention! This time, we went for homemade pasta.

Now, we kind of cheated and busted out the old PASTA-MATIC. It's a dinosaur of a pasta machine from my childhood. I kid you not - it is the actual pasta machine we used to use when I was a kid! Now this circa 1980's hunk of plastic did a pretty good job despite it's age! It was a hit with the kids, because they could see the process or making and shaping a dough into the pasta they are used to eating. We chose rigatoni and spaghetti because, well, what grade-schooler doesn't like playing with long stringy dough? (It had nothing to do with the fact that we lost most of the pieces over the years so these were our only choices...)

Anyway, see for yourself it was a blast! It did the trick of keeping the kids entertained - and we got dinner out of it!! My only complaint was the dough texture & taste was pretty basic. We only followed the whole wheat recipe in the instruction booklet but I am sooo looking for new one!! Anyone with experience in homemade pasta is invited to share their recipe here as a guest post. I would LOVE to find a recipe that I can stick to that actually tastes great too!

Homemade anything is fun to our family!!! We'll definitely give this another shot, and hopefully won't wait for another baby to do so!!