Homemade Pasta

By Vicky Nardone

Very glad this week is over.  Matt decided that our house would make the perfect location for this film he's shooting and so I had 30+ people traipsing around pretty much every room in my house besides our bedroom and the attic.  The house is still not back to normal - I have no idea where my tv clicker is so every time we want to change the channel we have to get up and change it on the tv itself.  Very retro.  On top of that, mother nature dumped about a foot of snow on Buffalo last night.  Here's what the view outside my living room window looked like this morning:

Matt had looked at the Doppler when we got back from Duffs for dinner last night and saw only this little band that looked like it was way south of us, so we had decided to leave the car out instead of putting it in the garage.  Apparently that was not a good idea though since it had about a foot of snow on it this morning when I woke up and the snow was still going.  I was out in my pajamas at 7:30 am trying to clear out enough of Matt's film equipment from my parking spot in the garage so I could get my car in.  Luckily the snow was the light fluffy kind and not the heavy wet stuff.  I made Matt snow blow the whole driveway by himself when he woke up later though.  What a bad wife!

Anyway, a good way to beat the mid-winter blues is to make some homemade pasta.  If you haven't figured it out yet, we are all about the kitchen gadgets in my house, so we use our kitchen aid mixer with pasta attachment to make our homemade pasta.  Here is the recipe for it that comes with the pasta maker attachment.



Ingredients (for 1.25 pounds of pasta or about 4 servings)
4 Large Eggs
3.5 Cups sifted all purpose flour
1tbs water
1tsp salt

Instructions

1. Break eggs into a glass measuring cup.  Check to see that eggs measure 7/8 cup.  If less than 7/8 cup add water, 1tsp at a time until measurement is reached.
2. Place flour and salt in stand mixer bowl.  Attach bowl and flat beater.  Turn to speed 2 and gradually add eggs and 1 tbs water.  Mix for 30 seconds.  Stop mixer and exchange flat beater for dough hook.  Turn to speed 2 and knead for 2 minutes.
3. Remove mixture from bowl and place on clean surface.  Dough may appear crumbly.  Hand knead for 30 seconds to 1 minute until dough is smooth, pliable and holds together in a ball.

After you make the dough you'll want to roll it into little balls like the below:

You can then feed the balls into your pasta maker attachment on the kitchen aid.  My mom got us the kitchen aid for my wedding shower and my best friend Katie got the pasta attachment also for my wedding shower.

Once you've cut all the noodles, you cook them like you would normal pasta but they only take about 5 minutest to cook since they're fresh and not dried:

I am really excited about the new pasta bowls that my dad and step dad Louie got us for Christmas this year.  They came from Crate and Barrel as a set of 4 with a big mixing bowl.

And here's the finished product!  We used Chef's spaghetti sauce with them.  It's one of my favorite sauces ever.  Chef's is a local restaurant in downtown Buffalo.  The Buffalo Sabres frequent it before their hockey games.  It's a sweeter sauce.  They sell it in the stores around us, but I'm not sure how far they distribute it.  My mom bought some fresh Stella parmesean cheese to put on top of it.  Here's the finished product (Excuse the presentation.  I forgot about taking a picture until I was halfway done eating it already).