I make my pesto with pine nuts, since I've noticed that if I toast up some extra, my daughter eats them like popcorn while she's making the sauce. If your kid likes walnuts, which are cheaper, use them instead.

Depending on how many children are in your kitchen, you can divide up tasks according to skill sets and interest. My 10-year-old and 7-year-old love cutting pasta noodles and grinding things up with the mortar and pestle. Younger kids tend to get a bigger charge out of pushing buttons and making noise, while older ones often appreciate the opportunity to show off their (supervised) knife skills.

Cook the pasta, then let the kids serve themselves (and you), by lifting out the noodles from the colander. Use a pair of big kitchen tongs if you have them -- for some reason, kids just love these things -- adding a spoonful of pesto, a sprinkling of pine nuts (if there are any left), maybe a dollop of fresh ricotta and a handful of cherry tomatoes.

Depending on how many people you're cooking for and what kind of appetites they have, you can use a full recipe's worth of pasta for dinner. Or you can do a little breakfast planning.

Use half of the pasta dough for dinner, then roll out the other half into slightly thinner sheets, cut these into pappardelle too and dry them overnight -- just hang them over the back of a chair. (My daughters think this is hilarious.)

The next morning, while you're making coffee and the kids are, you hope, still asleep, cook the dried pasta and make a breakfast kugel. (If you change your mind, save the dried pasta in a plastic bag -- broken into pieces, it's terrific in a pasta e fagioli soup.)

Breakfast option

A kugel is a kind of Jewish pudding, like a baked mac 'n' cheese, which can be made either sweet, with dried fruit and spices like cinnamon, or savory, with cheese and onions, maybe garlic. Your fresh pasta needs to be dried overnight to give it enough texture to hold up during 50 minutes of baking. The resulting dish is tender and moist, rather like a delicate lasagna.

Laced with apples, currants and walnuts, with a little mascarpone in the custard and spiced brown sugar scattered over the top like a crumble topping, it's a lovely dish that the kids will love. Noodles for breakfast!

A slice of the kugel, maybe with an extra bit of mascarpone and a cup of coffee, makes for a pretty great morning timeout for grown-ups too. If you're still sweeping a bit of flour off the floor, maybe pulling a stray noodle from the wall, you might make that a large cup of coffee.

Scattergood is a Times staff writer. amy.scattergood@latimes.com