We’ve had an email from Catelin:

I misfired with a bag of pasta yesterday and it went all over the floor instead of into the pan! With our dogs, the ten second rule definitely does not apply so we can’t eat it now but I can’t bring myself to just throw it away either.

What can I do with it? Can I compost it?

It’s probably ok to go on the compost heap – because our compost heap is very close to our house, I’m overly cautious and I usually say don’t compost cooked pasta in an open heap or bin in case it (or rather stuff it’s been cooked with) attracts vermin, but not-cooked stuff should be fine.

Aside from that, you might be able to reuse it in a non-culinary situation. We’ve used dry pasta in place of poker chips (worked fine until John started eating his pieces) and of course kids can use it to make art – macaroni being the most common for that but other shapes like bows (farfalle), shells (conchiglie), and twists (fusilli) would work just as well. Kids could also use tubular pasta – like penne and tortiglioni – for threading practise (be warned: you might end up with a billion pasta necklaces…).

Any other suggestions?

We covered leftover cooked rice about an eon ago but for some reason haven’t covered the other thing I usually over-estimate when cooking: pasta.

The obvious answer is, of course, lunch the next day and we usually go down the quick’n’easy route of it microwaved with a bit of pesto or fried up into a frittata.

And what about reusing it in other fun ways? I’m guessing like with cooked rice, pasta shapes work great as a filler in soups – just not added *too* early in the cooking process. Spaghetti/tagliatelle might be a bit too stringy for soups as they are but a little chopping up never hurt anyone.

Any other ingenious places you use it up? Or any crazy ways to use it in non-culinary situations?

(Photo by TouTouke)