Homemade

The moment I arrived in New Hampshire, my Mother picked me up from the airport and informed me that we were going to get pasta. Oh, Okay, great—grocery store run before heading back to the house? Oh no, we are driving an hour in the opposite direction to get homemade pasta.

And the whole drive over, my Mom raved about the pasta my family had eaten the weekend before.

We arrived after following the directions that described this pasta palace as the yellow house with the red barn across from the church.

Walking in, I was hit with the aroma of pumpkin and sweet potato—the newest additions to the ravioli menu. The shop made pasta and ravioli—along with deliciously rich pumpkin cupcakes— which it sold at locals farmers markets as well as the red barn.

With a culinary background and realizing the opportunities were low for the high-end restaurants in Southern New Hampshire, the family started making pasta sauce and sold it all. With this success, they began making pasta and put that up for sale. And, man am I glad they did—and that we went out of our way to get it.

Our dinner that night consisted of the pasta, sauce with elk meat from my parents farm and wine my father made. It looked, it smelled, and it tasted so much better than any other pasta dinner I had eaten before. The sauce was a perfect combination of fresh tomato, garden herbs, and tender elk meat — grass fed, free range, no hormones and if you don’t believe it from the taste, all I needed to do was look out to the backfields for confirmation. The pasta was unlike any other box pasta I had eaten—it wasn’t the rubbery pasta that comes from a box, but it wasn’t super doughy as if I was eating boiled, unbaked bread. Rather, it was light and full of flavor, the way pasta was meant to taste.

Perhaps part of the deliciousness of the meal was understanding each aspect of the dish—I had literally talked to the maker of everything. It wasn’t a mystery meal and it wasn’t a guessing game to discover the ingredients—it was something that I could appreciate with the understanding of the food. It was beyond simply cooking, it was a process that took the day, going from location to location and gathering the ingredients. Isn’t this the way meals were supposed to be made?