Recipe: Pasta

I recently got a pasta recipe from my old friend Liz, who writes the blog Slow Home Grown. I fiddled a bit with the proportions, put on my apron, rolled up my sleeves, and went for it.

Well, I'm happy to tell you that it worked really, really well, and I am here with photos to prove it, and a recipe so that all of you will immediately follow suit and make yourself some pasta from scratch. It was delicious. Neither Mr. Scrimp nor I had eaten all day and we ended up wolfing down pretty much all that I made... but that's ok, because it was also very easy.

If you own a pasta maker of some kind, well, good for you, and I'm envious. I don't, so my directions include how to make noodles without a pasta maker.




Ingredients (serves 2-4, depending on how hungry you are)

• 3 eggs
• 1/2 - 3/4 cup water
• 3 cups flour, plus more for dusting. I used bread flour but the recipe given to me didn't specify.
  

In a bowl, combine all ingredients. You can mess with this a little bit, depending on your own taste. If you add another egg, decrease the water. If you want to use fewer eggs, increase it. Add flour until dough is not too sticky to work with, and then knead.

I used my fabulous KitchenAid to do the initial kneading, then turned it out onto a silicon rolling mat to do the last bit and make sure there was enough flour incorporated to keep it from sticking to itself.

Divide the dough in half. On a well-floured surface, roll the dough into a flat rectangle or square, about 1/8 in. thick. Remember, the thickness of your dough at this point is going to be the thickness of your noodles.

Make sure that both sides of your dough are well-covered in flour, and then roll it into a tube. With a sharp knife, slice the tube of dough into strips.

The width of each strip of dough is going to be the width of each noodle. I found it helpful to flour each end of the rolled-up pieces as I cut them, because otherwise they stick when you unroll them.

Unroll your noodles, dusting with more flour as necessary to keep them from sticking to themselves and each other. You can hang them to keep them from tangling, but they will stretch fairly considerably. I laid them in a Pyrex bowl to keep them from tangling until I was ready to cook them.

When you're ready to cook, bring a full pot of water to a rolling boil. Dust off any excess flour, and drop the pasta into the water. You may need to stir them gently to break up any clumps of stuck-together dough. Cook for 5-7 minutes, until firm, and serve immediately.

Sadly, I have no picture for you of the cooked pasta, because we were so excited to eat it that we didn't want to stop and photograph it, and when I remembered again, we'd devoured it all.