Pasta pronto!

During one of my decluttering sessions in the basement, I came across my pasta machine.  Which I don’t think I’ve used since DD9 was born.  Oops!  However, it doesn’t take up thaaaaaat much space, so I decided to hang on to it.  And yesterday – while DD9 was off at a birthday party – I taught DS11 how to make fresh pasta 🙂

He passed the first test with flying colours…putting the machine together! ;D

I made up the pasta dough in my bread machine.  You dump everything in (600g flour, 5 eggs, 60ml water, 1 teaspoon of salt), switch on the machine and 15 minutes later you’re all set…

We put half of the dough in the fridge for another day.

First of all, I showed DS11 how to take small balls of dough and feed them through the machine several times.  You turn the dial to about 6 or 7 to begin with.  Then work your way down to about 3.  If you make the dough any thinner than that, it’s too difficult to work with.  And – hey – don’t worry about making the strips of pasta even lengths.  We want them to look rustic… 🙂

If you’re going to use the dough for ravioli or lasagne, you can use it straight away.  We left our strips of pasta to ‘dry’ on the kitchen table for half an hour because we wanted to make tagliatelle/fettucine.  If you try putting ‘moist’ dough through the cutters, it tends to stick and the strands don’t separate.

And now for the fun part.  Putting it through the cutters!

We hung it up over the backs of chairs.

Insert the theme from “The Godfather” here… ;D

At dinner time we boiled it in lots of very salty water.  It took about 4 minutes to cook.  And the final verdict?  Mamma mia, é squisito!

We ate it with a simple sauce of cream, garlic, green beans and some chunks of Danish sausage (Medister) that was left over from Saturday night.  Plus lots of fresh parmesan and black pepper.

See, now I’ve made myself hungry writing this blogpost!  Luckily it’s just coming up for 12 noon and there’s leftover pasta for my lunch.  Yum.

Have a marvelous Monday! 🙂