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Making the dough by hand: Mix the flour with the salt, and pour it out onto a wooden board or into a bowl. Make a well in the center of the flour; add the eggs, olive oil, and water to the well, and with a fork, gently beat the liquids. Slowly start incorporating flour from the inside edges until you have a thick paste, then gather the dough and knead it on the board until it comes together into a ball.

Rolling the dough: Using a hand-cranked pasta machine, divide the dough into 2 workable pieces (keep one wrapped while you roll out the other). Run each piece through the machine on setting #1 (the widest setting on your machine). Fold it into three pieces (like a letter), and run it through again, inserting the narrow end first. Set the machine to setting #2 and repeat the process, dusting with flour as necessary. At this point, you don’t need to fold the dough. Keep running it through each setting down to #6 or #7, depending on how thin you want the dough. I think a thinner noodle works well for this recipe.

Partially drying the pasta sheets: I like to lay the pasta sheets on a lightly floured counter for 10 minutes or so, flipping them over after 5 minutes. This dries them slightly, which is a good thing at this stage, as it will keep the individual noodles from sticking to each other when you cut the dough. Next, run the pasta sheets through the fettuccine cutter attachment on your pasta machine. Dust the noodles with flour and keep them spread out on the counter until you are ready to boil them. If you want to freeze them, wait about 30 more minutes, until they have dried further, and pull the pasta together into several bundles. Freeze these on a sheet pan, then transfer them to a resealable plastic freezer bag. Use within 2 weeks. You can cook the pasta directly from the freezer; just add a minute or so to the cooking time.

mussels

Shelton, Washington: January 2010. Gordon King, masterful mussel man and walking font of shellfish knowledge, whisks us out to the mussel rafts at Taylor Shellfish Farms. It’s cold and windy and we’re bundled up—hats, down coats, gloves, scarves. Gordon (in shorts) jumps out of the skiff and up onto the narrow, grated edging of the raft and shows us the lines where farmed mussels stretch far down into the water, filter feeding and thinking their mussel-y thoughts (which I imagine are quite limited).

Gordon is as passionate about farming mussels as I am about preparing them. The process is more straightforward than I had imagined it would be. Larvae are grown in a hatchery, placed onto mesh socks, dropped into Puget Sound, and then one-and-a-half years later are harvested by hand and sent to the processing plant where they are separated and cleaned.

First we are shown the adult mussels—ready to be harvested later that day. Moments later Gordon pulls up a rope gripped tightly by black-brown adolescents. Then he moves on to the other raft where the little babies, no bigger than a pinkie nail, are being lowered into their socks to take up residence for a time.

I draw my scarf tightly around my neck and turn away from the wind while scribbling notes in a little book. Later that night, a five-pound bag of mussels in the backseat, I stop by the market and pull out my note. It says: Mussels. Bread. Guinness. Cream. Test this.

WHAT MAKES THIS A GOOD CHOICE: Whether they are wild or farmed, mussels act as filter feeders, improving ocean water quality. Like all shellfish, their needs are simple: they eat solely from the phytoplankton floating by (no wild fish meal required).

BY ANY OTHER NAME: Oh boy, this is not as easy as you’d think, as there is a lot of debate in scientific circles about mussel species. For our purposes here on the Pacific Coast, we’ll focus on two species: Mediterranean mussels, or “meds” (Mytilus galloprovincialis), a nonnative species that is very easy to cultivate; and Mytilus trossulus, commonly known as the “Baltic” type. Washingtonians know the latter