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!

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