Countless parents are pulling out their hair as they deal with cooped-up kids during the coronavirus pandemic. What do you do with active bodies that can’t go to school, the playground or a friend’s house? Put ‘em to work in the kitchen!
This week’s recipe not only occupies antsy kiddos but also gets dinner on the table. And if your brood likes spaghetti and meatballs, they’ll approve of this dish.
Umbricelli is a hand-rolled noodle, a specialty of Umbria in central Italy. The noodles are thicker than spaghetti and are made with just water, flour and salt. This particular recipe is published in Ashley Rodriguez's "Let's Stay In" (Running Press, 2018), whose cookbook offers plenty of inspiration for quarantine cooking.
Once you make the pasta dough, grab the kids, have them thoroughly wash their grubby hands (a great COVID-19 teaching moment!) and then let them pinch off some dough and start rolling the noodles between their hands or on the counter. Rodriguez likens the method to “a toddler constructing Play-Doh snakes.”
When the kids start arguing about whose noodles are better, remind them that there’s no wrong noodle. “Don’t fuss with exactness: part of the fun when eating these noodles is all the variance in size,” Rodriguez writes.
She notes that making umbricelli is a labor of love; the project can take some time. She suggests encouraging anyone who wanders into the kitchen to lend a hand. The Sunday afternoon that I spent rolling soft dough into long snakes, no one wandered in. But I was content with a glass of wine nearby, oldies spinning on the record player, and colorful memories of my own kids’ Play-Doh days.
Umbricelli
Adapted from “Let’s Stay In” © 2018, by Ashley Rodriguez, Running Press.
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