Homemade Pasta

Okay - I like to think of myself as a from scratch cook....but to be honest, I'm really not.  I'd much rather use a mix than make from scratch if I have the chance.  Cakes from scratch never turn out quite right for me (except like carrot cake...lol), cheese cake never looks like I want it to, and so on and so forth, lol.  Since the title of this blog is living and cooking with wisdom, that would connote that I am trying to be wise in my cooking, which is healthy stuff.  Which would encourage more of the from scratch stuff...sigh.  and I really would...if I had more time to devote to it.  I'd love to make homemade ketchup, relish, etc.  Cream of mushroom soups, chicken stock, you name it - homemade is much better than the canned stuff.  I just found a recipe I'm going to try for homemade sweetened condensed milk that's sugar free!  I'm way excited to try that...
but anyway - the point of this, is pasta.

We were talking about what my daughter was going to make for dinner last night, and realized I hadn't gone shopping for the rest of our groceries yet.  I hadn't gotten any fettucchini, so she was thinking she needed to go to the store.  Hubby reminded us that we could make pasta...and next time I'll remind him how long that took...so we pulled out the pasta machine, and discovered we're missing the handle.  :(  So...I said, well, there's a way to do it by hand...
So we decided to do it. 
Oh boy. 
We found this site online called Serious Eats that had an excellent tutorial, and pretty much followed it.  Then we found another site (cooks illustrated) that described how to cut them by hand, and followed it.  So....we didn't eat until 8 pm...sigh.  It's just a little more convoluted than it sounds when you're not used to doing it and don't have a machine.
I should have taken a photo of my daughter mixing it on the counter, but I didn't think of pictures till we'd let the dough sit!  sigh. 
You make a well of the flour on the surface (our counter) and put the eggs and yolks in it, the mix it together until it becomes a ball, and then you knead it until it's firm, then you let it rest for 30 min in plastic wrap.  It's really pretty easy at this point.  We decided to do one batch on the counter, and one batch in the mixer.  I did the mixer...lol

basic recipe-
10 oz whole wheat flour
2 eggs
4 egg yolks (save the whites!!!)

 Here it is in the resting stage...
and here it is after being rolled REALLY thin and folded and sliced for fettuccini...

You have to make sure the dough is rolled evenly, which is a little bit of a pain when you don't have a large space to roll them.  I guess the table would have been better...  It's kind of hard to decide how thin you want them because you don't want wide ones...at least I didn't.  But I tried...  ;)

Can you imagine this scale???
I think if we were going to do a lot of them, we'd want one of these...

Then you lay them on a piece of parchment to wait till you cook them.  This is important, you've seen photos where pasta is hanging in streamers from sticks, right?  That's because if you lump it together it becomes a lump of dough!  You have to separate EACH Piece so that they don't stick together in the water.  We discovered this the hard way...had to re-roll a blob and make more noodles...  sigh.

here's a nice close up, sometimes I love my camera, lol

We're thinking it would be fun to try making spinach noodles...can you imagine how cool they would look?

And then you cook them.  They looked a little mushy to me, but they weren't!  They held their shape, they actually tasted like normal noodles, and everyone ate them.  We were afraid we wouldn't have enough, because they say one batch of the recipe I listed above is for 4 -6 people.  We did one batch on the counter, and I did one and a half in the mixer...and it made plenty for 7 people.  ;)  Amazing!  (that was all the eggs we had or we would have made more, and then we would have had tons of pasta!)

So...if you have a couple of hours one afternoon, make your own!  You'll be glad you did!  ;)