Lagman Noodles

Prepare the kneading and rolling surface


Who invented noodles, the Chinese, the Arabs, or the Italians? We may never know for sure, but a 4000-year old bowl of pasta was found in China in 2005!


Mix up the wet ingredients

Wherever noodles were first made, Marco Polo tried them and found them interesting enough to tell Rustichello da Pisa about them. Rustichello included Marco Polo's account of them in The Description of the World.


Mix with the dry ingredients until it's "doughy"

Our noodle recipe comes from The Silk Road by Kathy Ceceri.  (I know, I already wrote about this book in an earlier post, but there are SO many great projects in there, I had to share again!) We had never made noodles or any homemade pasta before, but I had always wanted to try. Learning about the Silk Road was a perfect excuse!

Knead until the dough is stretchy and smooth

After mixing and kneading the dough, the kids rolled it out flat. (We actually cut it into two sections so they could both roll. Next time, we will cut it into thirds because it expanded enough to cover our two biggest cutting boards and was still kind of thick.)

Roll and roll and roll...

Best thing about this project: the kids could do it totally on their own. No, wait. The best part was that they had so much fun!

Cut the dough into strips

The kids tried cutting the noodles with a pizza cutter and a knife. Super liked using the pizza cutter.

Try to make them all about the same size

Dude preferred using the knife. To each his own.

Hang them up to dry

Here is our makeshift noodle dryer. We had to set up three similar contraptions for all our noodles!

Save a bit of dough for experimenting

Dude wanted to use some of the dough to make his version of a manti, a dumpling that was a nomad's version of fast food. (Ever since Dude saw a Good Eats episode about ravioli, he has been wanting to try this!)




Make it pretty around the edges

We found it really interesting that they would dry or freeze the manti to carry with them as they traveled. Don't people buy dried and frozen ravioli and tortellini today?


Slide the dried noodles into the boiling water


We dried our noodles for about five hours. The recipe says to dry them for at least two; ours were so thick, I thought they needed some extra time. Plus, it was art class day. And Mom needed a short nap...


Cook until they seem done

I don't know how long we cooked them. We just kept checking on them every few minutes.


Noodles, butter and salt


And here are our delicious noodles! We considered making a Lagman noodle stew recipe that I found online, but the kids were eager to try their handiwork. So, we ate our noodles with butter and salt (Mom's favorite way.) The kiddos added Parmesan cheese to theirs.

We had another fun (and yummy) day of learning about the Silk Road! Hope you had a great day, too!

This post is linked to Favorite Resource This Week at Learning All the Time!  Check out all the great resources there!