MONDAYS are lasagne days in the De Rossi household in Romsey.
Tuesdays there's ravioli and cannelloni, Wednesdays gnocchi and crostoli, Thursdays sauces and Fridays are dedicated to plain, fresh spaghetti, fettucine and rigatoni.
This is not what the family eats for dinner, but the schedule they must stick to if they are to satisfy the hungry hordes who devour their Spaghetti Engineering pastas at weekend farmers' markets.
The De Rossi family - Anna and Bill, and their two daughters - each week make up to 700kg of pasta in more than 30 varieties, which they sell fresh and freshly frozen, at markets including Castlemaine, Bendigo and Trentham and butchers in Gisborne and Lancefield.
"Because we sell it fresh we have to make something every day of the week or we get behind," Anna says.
"We do it the hard way but our customers appreciate it."
And thanks to their customers their pasta range keeps ballooning.
While the family started five years ago with just a handful of traditional varieties, they have branched out into the non-traditional, including fettucine with Australian wattleseed or lemon myrtle and ravioli with rabbit or kangaroo. They're now working on a line in duck, venison and goat.
"A lot of the purists out there don't do it this way. They say stick to what's traditional and don't mix this with that," says Anna, who quit her job working in a pharmacy two years ago to work in the business full-time.
"Our crostoli is very reminiscent of the north of Italy, and our cannelloni too, but there's a bit of trial and error involved as well. I was taught by my Mum and she made ravioli with the left-overs from that week's dinner."
Anna's pasta is, in fact, a fusion of many influences - her own dabbling, as much as her heritage from northern Italy and her mother's teachings.
Her parents, Lillian and Lindo, moved to Australia in the late 1950s and Anna's earliest memories are of making pasta for the extended family who all lived under the one roof in Melbourne.
When it came time for Anna to cook for her own family and friends in Romsey, she was always being asked to be the key pasta cook. But it was when her husband, Bill, lost his job as an Ansett electrical engineer that the pasta business took off, after he started work fixing pasta machines.
"He'd work in pasta factories and he'd come back and tell me I made better pasta than those places," Anna says. " So we borrowed a machine and it started from there."
Now Spaghetti Engineering can be seen around the district, horse float in tow, carting their giant freezers and fridges chock-full of pasta treats.
Anna says the family have had to learn how to run a small business, not just manufacture the product.
"The business is hard work - the family knows if you want something then you've got to work hard for it," she says.
- Spaghetti Engineering, Romsey, ph: 0423 872 905.
