Pasta! Pasta! Pasta!

Ciao' Bella's and Bello's!

This is the Pasta Post!  Not long ago in class, about 2 weeks ago, we had our pasta, this carb-lovin' girls dream day.  I was amazed at how easy (and better tasting!) it is to make your own pasta.  I guarantee that everyone has the ingredients in their kitchens right now to whip some up.  I will advise though, you will want to get a pasta machine or if you have a Kitchen Aid mixer the attachments they have to go with it.  You will want the roller as well as some cutters.  I have a strong appreciation for my attachments after having rolled my own dough.

My first ravioli!

So after Pasta day, we had a homework assignment to make some of our own pasta and bring it in to class with a sauce of our choosing.  I chose to make a butternut/ricotta cheese/curry ravioli with a sage and brown butter sauce.  Knowing my children, I also made a sausage/sage/ricotta cheese filled ravioli for dinner as well.  All were made with love, 3 hours of love to be exact.  See I convinced DJ to order me the attachments as soon as class was over that week because I was so excited from making them in class and really had hoped that they would be there by the following Wednesday so I could use them for my homework.  Great plan in theory.  The didn't arrive.  So I borrowed a rolling pin from my neighbor (thanks Karen!) and got to work.

The eggs in the well.

To get started the first thing I did was make my dough.  3 cups of flour ( I used Semolina) 4 eggs, a 1TBSP olive oil and about 4 OZ of water on standby.  See, I told you that you would have it all in your house.  Pour flour into the bowl and push it out to the sides of the bowl so you have a well in the middle, the well is where the eggs and olive oil go.  Take a fork and mix the eggs with the oil like you would for scrambled eggs.  Gradually the flour will start to get pulled in.  Keep going till the dough is completely mixed.  Now it may start to get dry so this is where your standby of water comes in.  You want to the dough to be moist but not too moist.  All the flour should get absorbed in.  Should feel like Playdough when you are done.  Wrap in plastic wrap and rest in the fridge for an hour.

Your dough ready for it's rest.

After resting is over you are ready to start rolling it out.  You want a well floured mat or counter top to work on.  Keep a reserve of flour handy because you will use it to keep your dough from sticking.  I pull off a chunk, about a 1/2 C worths to work with.  If you take too much it will be hard to roll out really thin.

Feeding the dough through the roller with my attachments.

Now for those of you that may not remember what I look like, I am 4'11''.  Not exactly gifted in the height department.  So to roll my dough I had to drag a chair, and sit on my counter top to get enough leverage to roll out the dough.  The down side to being inexperienced is I could not quite get it rolled as thin as I would have liked.  But all in all they were pretty good.  Another thing I learned was to do an egg wash between my filling so it will act as a glue to keep them sealed together.

Some cut ravioli's.

It does take longer to cut out the ravioli's when you have rolled it yourself because you have less area space that is even.  When I did it with my attachments it came out in a nice long and even strip and I could get 10 cut at a time making 2 rows.  Rolling it came out in a circle like a pie crust and I couldn't get a lot of even spacing.

Thinning the dough.

Cutting the fettuccine.

When you are done cutting out some pasta make sure you cover and flour the surface they are on before you drop them in the pot.  You don't want them to stick to the surface or dry out from the air contact.  To cook them you want to bring some very salted (salty like the sea as Chef says) water to a nice rolling simmer, not a heavy boil.  Fresh pasta does not take long to cook. The Fettuccine I made only took 2 minutes.  The ravioli's only about 8 to cook.  If you make the ravioli's at home you can find so many different filling's online,  I looked at a bunch and then just kind of took elements from ones I liked and made my own.

As my luck would go, that Thursday when I came home from class, my box was out side my door with my attachments in it...new toys to play with...