Pasta!!!

This evening I made pasta. Fetticine, to be precise. Home-made. From scratch. M and I had been talking a few days ago about making pasta from scratch. I really wanted to do it (I've been watching too many Iron Chef America episodes lately :-P), and we were curious if we could save money by making our own pasta vs. buying dried pasta in the store. One thing we weren't sure about was how many meals we could get out of a single batch - just how much pasta could we make with a certain amount of flour and eggs (that's all it is). So while M is on overnight call tonight, after I cleaned up the kitchen (which I had let get into a sorry state) I decided to make my first attempt at pasta this evening.

So, armed with Iron Chef Mario Batalli's pasta recipe, a will to put my (non-existent) culinary talents to the test, and a grumbling stomach (not the best way to begin making pasta, it turns out), I set to it. 3.5 cups of flour, 6 large eggs. Mix it together, kneed it, kneed it some more, kneed it a little more. Let it rest for 20 minutes (good thing, I was tired of kneeding). Then start rolling it out and shaping it. We don't have a pasta roller, so it was the old fashioned rolling pin for me! ...and I thought kneeding was hard! I spent about an hour getting the pasta rolled out and cut into strips of linguini (that's what I thought I was making). When that was all done, I put some water on to boil. Then I realized I didn't have any tomato sauce or diced tomatoes or in fact any thing with which to make a tomato sauce. Oh no! Not deterred by this ginormous mountain of a roadblock, with heroic vim I turned to the only place a hero can turn to in a situation like this. Google. And there I found my solution! I found a recipe for no-tomato pasta sauce that featured cauliflower. Suddenly remembering that we have frozen bags of veggies in the freezer, including some with cauliflower, I whipped out a sauce pan and heated some olive oil. Then I added some garlic cubes and finally dumped the veggies in. Then some salt and pepper and tamoline chili powder (my current favorite experimental spice). I decided my "white sauce" wasn't white enough, or voluminous enough, so I added some milk. Brought that to a boil and then reduced the heat and let it simmer. (Actually, I was distracted for a moment and didn't notice that the sauce pan began boiling over - so now I have to clean the kitchen again. :-)) Then I started cooking the pasta! In the end, I had fetticine (not linguini) and way too little sauce for it all. Let's just say this: 6 large eggs and 3.5 cups of flour makes a lot of pasta. So I put a healthy helping in a bowl and then poured all the sauce on top, mixed it up, and this is my dinner. :-)

All in all, I have learned two important lessons from this adventure, and two very important lessons:

1. The first important lesson is that making pasta entirely by hand and with a rolling pin is hard work. And it's the rolling and cutting that takes the longest amount of time (I spent about 90 minutes making pasta - not counting the cooking), and of that 20 minutes were spent letting the dough sit, and about 60 minutes were spent rolling it out and cutting it).
2. The second important thing I learned is that pasta is actually pretty darn easy to make. There were moments when I really didn't think this pasta was going to turn out.

1. The first really important lession is that you shouldn't put all your cut pieces of pasta into a dry bowl while you cut up the rest. By the time I got to the cooking part, it had all stuck together pretty badly. This was one of those times when I thought it wasn't going to turn out, but in the end the stuck-together chunks seem to have become unstuck during the cooking.
2. The second really imprtant lession is that fresh home-made pasta is awesome. It tastes really good even plain and doesn't need any kind of sauce! Granted, I am eating my healthy helping with sauce, but that's partly because the sauce was already made. I will probably try a small bowl later tonight or tomorrow and see if I think it needs sauce or not.

So that's that, ladies and gentlemen. Today I took on Iron Chef Mario Batalli at his own game and came out the winner!