Homemade Pasta

I haven't posted much this month, and that's because there just isn't much to say about January, in the garden or in life. We're settling in for the long winter, back into routines at work and school, and waiting for our daily allotment of sunlight to improve.

But tonight we had something new and fun – it was the first time we used the pasta maker we got for Christmas! The kids were excited to give it a try after seeing Jamie Oliver make it look so easy, and it is a great way to use up eggs now that chickens are back in their own laying routine as well. 

So they mixed 400 grams of flour (I don't know how much that is in American – sorry) and 4 eggs into dough. Since we don't have a full-size food processor, Kirk did this by making a well of flour and mixing the eggs into it. On the counter. (And that's why I declined to help in the clean up, by the way.) Anyway, despite not being quite as fast at this as Jamie Oliver, the dough was a total success after being cranked through the rollers 10 times:


Then they cut the dough into a few more reasonably-sized sections and ran it through the wide pasta cutter, with the kids on catch-the-noodle patrol:


It took a bit to get through all that dough, but they had a blast, and ended up with a giant pile of pasta (of which only 1/4 is shown in the photo):


We probably don't need to make quite so much in the future – maybe only 300 grams of flour and 3 eggs would be about right. The kids were psyched to slurp up the world's longest noodles:


And I enjoyed the tender, fresh pasta with our garden tomato sauce (and a whole lot of Parmesan):


In the future I'm sure the process will get faster, and we will probably experiment with adding some whole wheat flour to the dough for additional flavor. This is definitely a process that we will enjoy for a long time to come!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w...
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin...
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel...
Read more