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Miamisburg native goes out of her way to bring fresh pasta to Dayton market
DAYTON — It’s a long drive for Melissa Hathaway to make every Saturday morning — from her home in Hartville, between Akron and Canton, to downtown Dayton — but it’s a bit of a homecoming, too, for the 1979 Miamisburg High School graduate.
Besides, there’s fresh pasta to sell.
Hathaway is the co-owner of Pastafinity, the newest vendor at the National City Second Street Market at East Second and Webster streets just east of downtown Dayton. Every Saturday (and at this point, Saturday only, even though the market is open Thursday and Friday as well), Hathaway packs up a couple of large coolers with ice packs and dozens of small packages of brightly colored fresh pastas and hits the highway.
Her partner Bruce Opdhal has been making fresh pastas for more than seven years, and Hathaway has a background in agriculture and organic gardening. The two sell pasta at a local market in Stark County, but would like to expand to southwest Ohio, where Hathaway grew up.
On a recent Saturday, the available pasta flavors included basil parmesan, roasted red pepper, curry, spinach, and portabella — making for quite a kaleidoscope of colors on a display plate. The pastas — fettuccini, angel-hair, and ravioli — are made with Durum and Semolina wheat flour, and Hathaway said her partner uses fresh and locally grown ingredients to blend with the wheat to make the flavored pastas.
The fresh pastas cost $2 for a quarter-pound, or $7 a pound. Hathaway also sells small tubs of compound (or flavored) butters such as sun-dried tomato or garlic-herb for $3.50. The pastas keep for a week refrigerated and can be frozen for future use, she said.
Hathaway is still in her first month at the Dayton market, “but we’re very pleased with the reception so far. We’re excited. Our intent is to bring these products to the Dayton and Cincinnati markets.
“So we’ll be here every Saturday through the rest of the year — weather permitting. We get more snow up there than you get down here.”
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: New food items
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By Chef Boyardee
February 25, 2009 11:43 AM | Link to this
Seven dollars for a pound of pasta? For goodness sake, it’s just eggs, flour, and whatever you want to add to flavor and color it up. Doesn’t anybody do anything for themselves any more? How do people expect to survive the depression without such basic skills?
By RATinA_CAGE
February 24, 2009 8:35 AM | Link to this
This is infinately better to the fastfood crap that Dayton normally flock to—the availability of fresh pasta made with locally-grown ingredients is a wondertfull idea! Good luck to Miss Hathaway.
By Jean
February 23, 2009 4:47 PM | Link to this
Thanks for the info, Mark. I’ll be sure to look for her this Saturday when I’m at the market.