Notes from the Test Kitchen: Behind the scenes for pasta with kids

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OK, so who doesn’t like to play with their food? When we set out to shoot Amy Scattergood’s cover story this week, ‘Homemade pasta, a perfect cooking project for kids,’ we had some young chefs-in-training who showed us just how much fun making, eating -- and shooting -- pasta can be.

We were lucky a couple weeks ago when Bridgette and her brother Bob happened into the test kitchen; they had the day off from schoool and Mom brought them by. We were prepping dishes to shoot for the pesto and kugel recipes and asked if they’d be interested in helping demonstrate the basic pasta recipe. We didn’t have to ask twice -- less than five minutes later they were in the studio, already dusted with flour and ready to go.

Bridgette and Bob were great sports throughout -- taking direction here, standing there, rolling and re-rolling the pasta just so, even holding a tempting bite of pappardelle with pesto (for what must have seemed like an eternity) until photographer Steve Osman got the right shot.

After we finished the shoot in the studio, we moved the pasta setup to the adjacent test kitchen. The kids donned extra chefs coats and continued rolling and cutting pasta -- into beautiful hearts and a rather scary snake.

-- Noelle Carter