Flour, when properly contained, is harmless and soft like velvet, but let it get out of your control for one second and it becomes billowing clouds or tendrils finding a draft of wind to seek new places in your house in which to land.

This happened to me the first time I made raviolis; flour covered everything and everyone. The end result was reminiscent of a Three Stooges kitchen or haunted house short.

The work and mess is worth every bite and there is no substitute for fresh pasta. Fortunately, there is now a place to buy freshly made pastas, sauces, salads, and bread that can be ready to eat in a short amount of time. Pasta Plus is nestled in a corner of a shopping center and is set up for the busy professional or family or anyone that wants a healthy meal that's easy to pick up, heat, and serve.

This is also a lovely idea for food to take to someone who is ill or to a grieving family.

Gail Waxman is the owner of this 8-month-old store and she's very excited to offer her products to the bluegrass. She told me that when she lived in New York, there were many fresh pasta shops that she frequented and after moving here, she missed being able to buy it and wanted to offer the opportunity to others.

As you walk into the store, there are reach-in refrigerators holding ready to eat meals and freezers with neat stacks of shirt boxes filled with many types of ravioli. The front of the house is self-serve, and in the kitchen there is a giant, stainless steel machine of modern Italian design that makes the fresh pasta. It has a large sort of bowl at the top that mixes the durum and semolina flours (for the noodles, just durum for the ravioli) then a drum just below works the dough and rolls it out into very thin sheets. There is a cutter on the side that makes fettuccine, linguine, spaghetti, and angel hair and on the other side of the machine, there's a complex system with a heavy die that inserts filling into pasta and cuts it into large rounds making the ravioli.

These are enormous ravioli and the fillings are delicious: spinach and cheese, smoked mozzarella and roasted red pepper, provolone and sun dried tomato, cracked black pepper and goat cheese, smoked salmon and chives, portabella mushroom, roasted garlic and shrimp, and lemon ravioli with pumpkin. They are packaged by the dozen in paper boxes with tissue over them so that the moisture can escape. Fresh pasta packaged in plastic creates soggy pasta, which I found out the hard way by covering my first experimental ravioli in plastic wrap.

There is eight-layer lasagna with Italian sausage and marinara sauce along with vegetable lasagna that has a béchamel sauce, blush sauce, eggplant, spinach, zucchini, mushroom, and red bell pepper. One of the things that I liked the best about this is if you drop off your lasagna pan, Gail will cut the pasta sheets to size and fill your pan with lasagna to take home and bake. This would be perfect for a party. She has also received calls in the morning from clients asking if they could pick up a meal for eight people that afternoon which is generally not a problem.

Other pastas are available including manicotti but other Italian favorites are offered as well. Chicken, veal, or eggplant parmigiana, and chicken breasts stuffed with the chef's "whim of the day" are packaged next to five sauces to accompany any of them. Marinara, sausage, alfredo, vodka, and blush sauce are made using the freshest vegetables and best imported ingredients. Fresh salads with Mediterranean olives, chickpeas, tomato, cucumber, and scallions and bread from the Bluegrass Baking Company round out a nice take-home meal.

If you happen to be in Versailles between 11 and 2 o'clock, lunch is being served also. The favorite here is the grilled panini sandwich which might include Genoa salami, pepperoni, and Capicola ham, or maybe imported, smoked Black Forrest ham with swiss or havarti cheese. There are many types of sandwiches and they are offered with a basil mayonnaise or red pepper mayonnaise. If you're still hungry, there are three types of soup (which change during the week) and desserts from a company out of Boston.

Fresh pasta is light, has sort of a crispness about it, isn't chewy, and is worth the drive to Versailles.

(Actually, she is looking for a business site in Lexington and some frozen items are currently available at Sloan's in Lansdowne.) This is a very easy, fast, healthy dinner with the best ingredients that should be lingered over with a good chianti and maybe some Louis Prima and Keely Smith.

Please email your culinary heads-ups to Karen at kworkman@aceweekly.com.