New Christmas toy

Hubby surprised me with a pasta press this Christmas. Apparently last year during our first unprocessed month, I was bemoaning the fact that, although I'd gotten pretty good at making fresh pasta, I still had to buy elbows for mac-n-cheese and tuna salad and rotini or fusilli for other pasta salads and casseroles.

I hadn't really thought about it much - when I made mac-n-cheese, I just used fettuccini...a little unconventional but just as tasty.

But apparently after hearing me complain a few times, my wonderful hubby jumped online, ordered me the pasta press for my stand mixer, and it's been sitting in the closet of our guest bedroom ever since.


Last night, I mixed up my normal pasta dough (3 eggs and 8.5 ounces of white whole wheat flour) and tried it out. We tested out both the rotini and fusilli plates.


The dough was a little too dry, I think,and the fusilli didn't curl, but we figured it out. We served the pasta with some sauce we received from one of hubby's coworkers for Christmas, and along with some leftover broccoli slaw and Christmas ham, it made quite an easy and delicious dinner!

Homemade pasta success!

My mom came over for her birthday dinner last night. I'd called her earlier in the week and said, "I'll make you anything you want for dinner...what would you like to order at Abby's restaurant?" She said (in typical mom form), "Oh, anything you want to make is fine! I don't want to have to pick. I just want it to be easy for you! Whatever's no work! We can even order in pizza!"

And after a few more minutes of me throwing out suggestions and her vetoing them, she said, "Ohhhh, how about some of your new homemade pasta? And that cheesecake you posted?? And garlic bread?" Sure, Mom! =)

For my birthday (in addition to a fabulous new apron and an heirloom cookbook of my husband's family's recipes), my in-laws gave me Food & Wine's book on Pasta. It is awesome...it has a section on making homemade pasta, Italian pasta dishes, Asian pasta, American pasta, super fast pasta. I decided to try their basic egg pasta recipe.

They list egg and flour quantities for 3/4 pound and 1/2 pound of pasta, but I wanted to make a full pound. They call for extra-large eggs; I only had large. Plus they indicate that you should add 2 extra tablespoons of flour if you're using the food processor method (which I was). They give a really nice description of how to tell if your pasta dough is ready, so I ended up going entirely by feel this time. I ended up using 4 large eggs and about 3 cups of all-purpose flour.

I let the dough relax, wrapped in plastic, for an hour while I worked on my mom's cheesecake, although they say the resting stage isn't necessary if you're going to roll the dough by machine (which I was). The dough rolled out easily; I learned my lesson with flour last time. My pasta machine handbook says to roll out to 4 or 5 for fettucine; the cookbook says 6. I decided to try it, and I ended up with eight sheets of very thinly rolled pasta.

They claim that, even if you roll by machine, you should never cut by machine. After my major difficulties with using my spaghetti and fettucine cutters the last couple of times, I was actually happy to read this. I used my pizza wheel to cut the folded sheets into 1/4 inch strips. It was when it was 10:00 at night and I was hanging each strand up to dry that I said to my hubby, "I don't think that pasta making is going to become an obsession like bread making has....it's too time-consuming and tedius, and the results aren't that much better than store-bought."

After an hour, I put the pasta into a glass jar and then into the fridge.

The next night, dinner was pretty easy. I boiled the pasta in a pot of salted water for about 2 or 3 minutes. I heated some of our favorite spaghetti sauce, which I'd had in the freezer downstairs. I used the pain a l'ancienne recipe from ABED to make garlic bread. (I actually made 6 loaves; we used 2 last night, but I turned them all into garlic bread and froze the other 4.) And we had cheesecake with strawberries for dessert.

This pasta was awesome, by far the best I've ever made. With pasta this good, I can see why I would want to make homemade pasta frequently. I used the leftovers in my favorite chicken noodle soup recipe tonight...I don't think we'll be able to go back to the stuff from a box!

30 minute pasta: Fusilli with sausage and zucchini (with bonus for dessert)

This one took 46 minutes from walking into the kitchen to sitting down at the table. Part of that was because I elected to go with Guilliano Hazan's homemade sausage, and I hadn't made it ahead of time. (Actually, it was supposed to be made a day ahead and refrigerated for the flavors to meld, but we thought it tasted great, even made at the last minute.)

That's not the whole reason for the extra time, though, as the sausage only took a few minutes to throw together. It was easy-peasy: ground pork, garlic, salt, pepper, and dry white wine.

I'm actually not sure how this recipe could fit into thirty minutes, as there are several steps where things have to cook for 10 or more minutes. But it was still easy and totally worth it; I really loved this one! The sauce was made with onion, butter, sausage, zucchini, salt, and fresh tomatoes. Then it was tossed with the pasta and some freshly grated parm.

While it was cooking, I had the thought that mushrooms would be good, too, but because these recipes are so simple, I feel like I need to make them as written the first time to see what they're supposed to be. I will make this one again, definitely with mushrooms next time.

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After eating dinner and putting the kids to bed, hubby and I were craving something special for dessert. I'd been drooling over the recipe for Chocolate Cake Heart's Desire which Joanna posted (from the River Cottage Everyday cookbook) ever since she first posted, but we haven't had fancy chocolate in the house for ages! Luckily, we'd just been to the store and I'd remembered to pick up some Lindt 70%, so I was finally able to make this cake. I halved the recipe, and it provided us with a delicious dessert for two nights (with ice cream, of course). Yum!

Not-quite-30 Minute Pasta: Rigatoni with onions, pancetta, and pecorino

When my hubby walked into the kitchen tonight, looked up at the clock, looked at dinner on the table, and looked at the copy of Giuliano Hazan's Thirty Minute Pasta sitting on the counter, he said, "I think this book is worth purchasing ~ not just checking out from the library!"

I'm sure many of us have had the experience of going to cook a "quick" recipe for the first time and having it take twice as long as it's supposed to, as you figure out the methods, realize too late what you forgot to prep, have meat that needs to be cooked in two batches. So I knew that my first foray into 30 Minute Pasta would be pretty quick, but I was not anticipating 27 minutes from walking into the kitchen to sitting down at the table.

Kayte joined another cooking group: Thirty Minute Thursdays, and when she posted about it, I was intrigued. We are always looking for quick recipes for those kinds of nights (you know the type I'm talking about, right?), and pasta is pretty much never-fail in our house.

However, I can't commit to cooking on Thursday nights. You see, Thursday nights and I just don't get along. For some reason, I'm up for cooking (an intricate dish, something thrown together, whatever) pretty much every Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, but for some reason when Thursday rolls around, I just can't get myself to walk into the kitchen. It took a lot of weeks of "What's for dinner?" arguments before we finally realized that they always happened on Thursdays, and thus Thursdays became hubby's night for dinner. Sometimes he makes one of his specialties: fajitas, tacos, eggs in a nest; sometimes he just goes and gets us a pizza. Whatever he decides, I take no responsibility for dinner that night, which always feels really good.

Anyway, today was one of those days: didn't get home until midnight from our debate tournament and 18-hour work day yesterday, had to be back at school at 6:20 this morning to make sure the debaters got on the bus for day two of the tournament, then went to swimming lessons with the kiddos, followed by a winter festival at the little guy's preschool. It was big day, and I did not have it in me to cook dinner.

Enter Thirty Minute Pasta! Hubby picked the recipe: Rigatoni with onions, pancetta, and pecorino. Besides those three ingredients, this recipe includes olive oil, salt, and pepper. That's it. And it was on the table in 27 minutes.

The final dish was too salty for my taste. The pancetta is salty by itself, and then GH has you salt the pasta water (I only used one of the two tablespoons of salt he calls for) and lightly salt the sauce. Next time, I think I'll omit the salt from the sauce and go even lighter on the salt in the pasta water. But it was a tasty, quick dinner, and perfect for a night like tonight. I can't wait to see what the rest of the book has in store!

2011: The year of pasta, lesson 1

Early this past year, I decided I might like a pasta roller for my Kitchenaid for a Christmas present. I had a few reasons: I really love learning how different foods are made; I figure that homemade almost always tastes better; I like to know all of the ingredients in foods that I feed my family. Also, my mother-in-law makes chicken and noodles for us every time she visits. I tried following her recipe once, but I really struggled with the homemade egg noodles; she rolls and cuts them by hand and I had a difficult time getting them thin enough . . . and doing it quickly enough so that the meal could be done in a reasonable time.

Anyway, chatting with Kayte and Natashya on Twitter, I learned that they were also requesting pasta attachments for Christmas, so Kayte suggested that if 2010 was the year of bread for many of us, maybe 2011 could be the year of pasta!

Happily, under the tree I found the pasta attachment (roller, spaghetti cutter, and fettuccine cutter), a pasta drying rack, and a ravioli press from my awesome hubby.

Being someone who loves doing research and gathering information, I tried to find some books on pasta-making, hoping for the same love I feel for books on bread-making. I found many cookbooks specializing in pasta dishes, but none specializing in making pasta. I began to fear that there wasn't enough to learn about pasta.

I was wrong! While I couldn't find a book on making fresh pasta, almost every pasta/Italian cooking book I looked in had a variation of "basic fresh egg pasta" ~ and they're all different!

I tried two to start: one from America's Test Kitchen's Family Cookbook and one from Lidia's Italy. I mixed up both in my food processor and then finished kneading by hand.

Check out how different the two recipes are:
ATK (1 pound fresh egg pasta for fettuccine)
2 cups all-purpose flour
3 eggs

Lidia (1 1/2 pounds fresh egg pasta for fettuccine)
3 cups all-purpose flour
3 eggs
3 egg yolks
3 tbsp olive oil
1/4 cup water

Both mixed up fine. I put Lidia's into the fridge for the following day and decided to use the ATK one to make ravioli. I mixed up a simple filling (also from their Family Cookbook) of ricotta, mozzarella, fresh basil. I used my new roller to roll the dough into strips and then used my new ravioli press. It took a while to figure out how to get my strips wide enough, but ATK has several helpful hints on their pasta pages about using a pasta roller. I also realized after my first (difficult!) attempts with the ravioli maker that it had to be floured extremely well to get the ravioli to release from the maker. But I ended up with three dozen ravioli, bagged in the freezer and ready for a busy weeknight's dinner! (And it was used that way, on a night when hubby was out and a friend was over, it was dinner time and there were three hungry little ones . . . frozen ravioli and frozen leftover bolognese: yum!)

The next afternoon, I pulled out the dough made with Lidia's recipe. I rolled out the sheets of dough, which went even easier than the previous night, and stored them between layers of a damp kitchen towel, as I'd done with the ATK recipe.

Disaster struck when I went to cut the dough. I was planning to make spaghetti but when I tried to put the first strip into the cutter, it just blobbed up. Nothing went through. So I switched to the fettuccine cutter. Got a couple of usable pieces, but mostly just giant blobs. It was so frustrating! And then I went to pull the next strip off of the damp towel. Totally stuck.

We ended up cooking a couple of boxes of packaged rigatoni for dinner, along with about ten strands of fettuccine that made it through the cutter. I was too discouraged to even scrape the rest of the dough off of the damp towel, so I made my hubby do it. I did stop him when he went to throw it away, though, and had him put it in the fridge instead.

One of our dinner guests said that when he used to work at a restaurant that used a similar roller for pizza dough, they had to use a TON of flour. Which is when I realized: duh! ATK has you store the rolled sheets under a damp towel because their recipe includes no moisture and the dough would dry out. But Lidia's includes more eggs and water and oil; of course it needed to be stored between layers of flour and not a damp cloth!

Sure enough, when I was alone later in the evening, I pulled out the dough, rerolled it (using a lot of flour) and then ran it through the cutter. Beautiful, perfect fettuccine! Here is another batch, made tonight, served with Cook's Country's Sunday gravy: an incredibly flavorful spaghetti sauce made with leftover pot roast (from their newest issue).

So lesson #1: use a lot of flour! This is where my bread-baking may get in the way of my pasta-making. I'm so used to using as little flour as possible to roll out dough and never adding any extra; I'm going to have to change that behavior to become successful with pasta!