KATHMANDU, July 5: Nepal has exported noodles and pasta worth more than Rs 2 billion during the first 11 months of the current fiscal year.

A great way to add flavor to a pasta dish is to toast the noodles in oil, which brings out nutty notes that add complexity to the final result. And a great example of this lesson is sopa seca, which translates to “dry soup” from the Spanish.

On the Italian island of Sardinia, we were smitten with a richly flavored pasta with ground pork and wild fennel. It came loaded with a host of spices and herbs, including parsley, black pepper, fennel seed, paprika, red pepper flakes, onion and salt.

A combination of pasta and summer squash results in a light, flavorful dish that’s full of color. We decided against peeling the squash, as the skin helped to keep the pieces intact throughout the cooking process. Because summer squash contains so much liquid, we salted and drained it to keep our sauce from ending up watery and bland.

You’d never know that pasta primavera, a pseudo-Italian dish that appears on virtually every chain restaurant menu, actually has roots in French haute cuisine. The usual reproduction a random jumble of produce tossed with noodles in a heavy, flavor-deadening cream sauce tastes nothing like spring.

We wanted to create a pasta dish that brought out the delicate, earthy flavor hiding in supermarket mushrooms. We selected cremini mushrooms, which have a meatier texture and a more intense, woodsy flavor than button mushrooms but are still readily available.

There is something magical about this recipe, which coaxes the ultimate flavor out of just a few humble supermarket ingredients, turning them into a rich-tasting and well-balanced pasta dish that will have your family reaching for seconds.

KATHMANDU: Rox restaurant at Hyatt Regency, Boudha is hosting its ‘Homemade Pasta’ promotion event from Wednesday to Friday (June 30).