When I think of pasta, I think of comfort food. It makes me think of egg noodles tossed in butter and topped with Parmesan cheese and cracked pepper, a favorite late-night treat of mine when I was little. Or of my grandmother's amazing spaghetti sauce, a rich rag£ that simmered on the stove all day. She made it with whole pork chops, which would be cooked until all the meat fell away from the bone. It also makes me think of my Grandma Kennedy's homemade pasta, of her manicotti that only tastes right when made in the Le Creuset dish my grandfather brought from Paris.

Of course, with all this nostalgia, the pasta I make in my kitchen has a hard time competing. How can I make a dish as perfect as the ones I remember? For starters, the pasta itself has to be primo. If you don't make your own, several of the stores in town carry a wonderful variety of noodles. You can find your classic pasta shapes-capellini, rigatoni, penne and so on-sitting alongside wood- or bronze-mold-formed Ligurian disks (these look a lot like a thick Communion wafer), armoniche (ruffles), lasagnotti (petite, ruffle-edged lasagna strips), girandole (giant rigatoni) and campanelle (a bellflower shape I like to use in my version of minestrone soup). Such handmade pastas have a wonderful, rough texture that grabs hold of sauces, making them preferable to the perfectly cut, factory-made versions you see in most grocery stores.

In addition to these unusually shaped pastas, I saw some new and interesting flavors. For instance, Euro-Mart (48 E. Springfield Ave., Champaign) carries red chili, curry and spicy sesame-flavored noodles under the Al Dente brand. Art Mart (Lincoln Square Mall, Urbana) carries black squid-ink pasta and vegetarian seaweed tortils-pasta made with spirulina, wakame and nori, in addition to the more traditional semolina. These flavors should be enough to get any chef's imagination going!

The next step, of course, is complementing these different kinds of pasta with sauces and oils. Different shapes and textures lend themselves to different recipes. Certainly, you wouldn't want to top delicate angel hair with a heavy meat sauce.

Looking through the sauces at the various stores in town, I found pumpkin pesto (which would be wonderful this time of year), arrabiata (a spicy tomato-based sauce perfect with penne), puttanesca (a tomato-based sauce with black olives), classic basil pesto (a Ligurian favorite that's ideal with the disks described earlier) and oils infused with basil, rosemary and garlic. During winter, I lean toward hearty, meaty sauces-sauces with pancetta or stewed meats (think lamb, rabbit, beef, pork or even game birds). Visit Persimmon Grocery (111 N. Walnut St., Champaign) for your pancetta and check out the selection of salami, free-range meats, artisanal cheeses and mainly Italian wines there. Also, don't forget about pastas from other parts of the world. German egg noodles are nice when topped with goulash, and several of the Asian markets in town have wonderful fresh noodles that are perfect with miso broth, shrimp and chili pepper flakes.

While cooking and trying new flavors at home brings me a lot of joy, I can't forget that we have some wonderful restaurants in town. I recently had a delicious meal at Bacaro (next to Persimmon Grocery) that emphasized the best flavors of the season. The roasted winter squash bruschetta topped with chopped pistachios and toasted pumpkin oil was a perfect complement to my main course, the strozzapreti, which features hand-formed Umbrian pasta topped with a rabbit rag£ and Pecorino locatelli. This strozzapreti is not to be confused with the spinach and ricotta dumplings of the same name ("strozzapreti" means "priest choker" in English; legend has it that they were so delicious, a priest ate too many too quickly, and choked), but it is delicious nonetheless. My dining companion had the risotto, which while technically not pasta (risotto is usually made with Arborio rice), was a delicate and imaginative dish. The chef created a special vegetarian risotto with sun chokes, Jerusalem artichokes, arugula and turnip puree. This creamy risotto was accented with more of the Pecorino locatelli that topped my strozzapreti.

Other restaurants in town feature fresh pasta, among them Timpone's and Minneci's. The Great Impasta has pasta made from scratch every day.

This weekend, get out of the spaghetti rut and discover all that pasta has to offer.