Book excerpt: At last, a cookbook about pasta-making that covers all kinds of pasta machines—both manual and electric, and also stand-mixer pasta attachments—and that delivers foolproof recipes sure to make you an expert noodle master in no time! Homemade pasta is easy, fast, and fun. It tastes better than boxed pastas from the store. And, while-store-bought pastas do indeed come in a variety of shapes, they all have basically one bland and unexciting flavor; by contrast, as this wide-ranging and deliciously inventive book shows, making pasta by hand at home lets you create and enjoy dozens and dozens of different flavors of noodles. In her previous books—on such subjects as searing, marinating, and cast-iron cooking—chef, cooking teacher, and food blogger Lucy Vaserfirer has earned a reputation for expertly and gently translating the methods of master chefs into simple-to-follow, step-by-step instructions that let home cooks cook like the pros. Here, Lucy does the same for pasta-making, showing you how easy it is to use a sheeter or an extruder of any type, manual or electric, to create tasty pastas that will please everyone from grown-up gourmands to picky kids who want pasta at nearly every meal. Lucy shares in these pages terrific purees that you can make, using a blender or a mixing bowl, that you then can turn into all sorts of flavored pastas, from the familiar tomato or spinach pastas to noodles flavored with herbs like basil or tarragon, spices like pepper or saffron, and other flavors, such as a Sage Brown Butter Pasta that incorporates a flavored butter. She teaches you how to make every kind of pasta shape with your pasta machine, including ones you can't find in stores. She includes durum and semolina pastas, the most common kinds, as well as buckwheat, ancient-grain, and gluten-free pastas. She even shows how to make Asian noodles, such as udon, soba, and ramen, with your pasta machine. Whether you are a first-time owner of a pasta maker or a seasoned pro looking for exciting new ideas, this book has more than 100 splendid recipes, plus loads of clever tips and tricks, that will make you love your pasta machine and use it often.