Twice now we have made lasagna and made the noodles for it. I have been using the pasta recipe from Alice Waters' the Art of Simple Food, a book I have used and appreciated a great deal recently.
An interesting revelation regarding the grain:
for today's preparations I coached my dear one over the phone on the modifications I make to this recipe, as he was to mix up the pasta dough before I got home. Some weeks ago, I bought a bag of Bob's Red Mill semolina. It is coarse and yellow. In my first batch of pasta I used half of this semolina, half all-purpose flour. This resulted in a stiff dough that was difficult to roll out by hand (though the finished lasagna was quite delicious). In this house, we also have indian semolina, or sooji, and it is lighter though still coarse. In any case, my companion used the sooji (his culinary predisposition is toward indian food) and a different (lower) proportion of semolina to all-purpose flour, and the result was a wonderfully tender noodle. This substitution led me to appreciate that the atta, or chapati flour we use for making indian parathas and roti is also a durum wheat, and semolina comes from the endosperm of durum wheat.
