Weekend Recipe- Making Homemade Pasta

Weekend Recipe- Homemade Pasta

This weekend I sat down to pick out 2 more recipes from Chef Michael Smith's Book.

I was immediately drawn to the "Pan Rushed Salmon with 3 

tomatoes".

That recipe will be featured in its own blog post on Monday.

I was trying to think of a side dish that would pair nicely with all those tomatoes.

And what's better then some nice homemade pasta?

I hit google looking for some recipes and sure enough I found 1 million.

I love Google.

Now growing up I remember one or two times my mom making homemade noodles.

It was many many years ago now, but I can still remember that softness and taste of fresh pasta.

I think you need to at least once in your life make pasta at home.

First I arranged all of my ingredients... ALL 4 ingredients..

THATS IT!

To start off you make a well of flour. You mix everything on your counter top. I know... I thought the same thing... this is going to get MESSY!  Yes you are right, it will be messy, but hey you can clean up after! 

Ok, well I said it was going to get messy. But it got really messy, and my nice neat 'well' started out dinner plate size and ended up platter size haha! 

I started slowly incorporating everything with a fork like instructed and I started thinking.. 

"wow this doesn't look so good"

It looked lumpy and I was really second guessing myself.

In pic 3 this is where I was wondering how on earth this dough was going to come together. It eventually did with a lot of mixing, and then kneading. I scrolled down on the instructions to see what was next, and it said to knead the dough for 8-10min until smooth and elastic.
8-10min of kneading...YIKES... !
Out comes old faithful, my kitchen aid mixer. I put on the dough hook attachment and let it work the dough. And guess what...? In 9 minutes I had a nice smooth dough, that actually looked like it SHOULD.
In pic 4 above, the dough had only been hand kneaded. It was lumpy and not smooth at all. Look at the difference 8-10 min of kneading makes.

Next the dough gets wrapped in plastic wrap and sits to rest for 15min.

This was a great time to hang out with the little one.

My youngest daughter Emilie and I decided to use 15 minutes to take as many "selfies" as we could with my phone. These were quite cute and I thought  I would share them with you.

She loves watching herself in the reverse camera setting.

After 15 minutes of "selfies" and playing it was time to cut the dough. 

On the instructions list, it says to split your dough into 4 pieces just for the reason of the kitchen aid dough attachment. But it was nice to do this for the manual method. Smaller pieces of dough are much easier to roll out and work with. Be sure to keep them wrapped so the dough doesn't dry out.

I used a pizza roller to cut strips.

As I was cutting these strips, I came to realize how awesome the pasta attachment for my kitchen aid would be. 

I wanted to add, that this dough was amazingly easy to work with. Much different then I expected after seeing that lumpy ball I started out with. A little time and effort pays off. 

Now, this pasta doesn't require drying like some do.

But.... I piled my cut pasta in a bowl to set aside for later.

Not a wise idea. I had a tangled mess of noodles in my bowl. 

I spent the next 10 minutes laying my noodles out on parchment paper to dry slightly.

This is when I discovered how to make my noodles longer and thinner.

I stretched them a little and then twirled them like a 'skipping rope"

I ended up with nice long, thin noodles. 

These noodles were to be paired with my first 'recipe of the week', Pan Rushed Salmon with 3 tomatoes. While I was working on that recipe, I boiled some water and cooked my noodles.

These noodles were DELICIOUS! 

The texture was fantastic and they were not gluey or starchy tasting.

My kids gobbled down a whole plate at dinner. 

I reserved half of this noodle recipe in the fridge for friday when I will be doing my on film audition for "Come Dine with Me Canada"

This recipe would make enough pasta for at least 4-6 people.

Maybe even more if you used a pasta maker to make the dough thinner.

I really hope this post inspired you to do a "Weekend Recipe"just like I did.

It does require a little work, but the benefit of having fresh pasta is just to die for! 

Get your kids involved too, they will LOVE it.

Let me know if you tryout this recipe! 

Enjoy & Take Care

I have included the link below to the website I used for ingredients and instructions.

http://www.cookingchanneltv.com/recipes/kelsey-nixon/fresh-pasta-dough.html