Pasta, Pasta, Pasta!!

 So this past week my husband surprised me.  He informed me he was not only going to make family dinner on Sunday, but that he was going to make fresh pasta.  Yes, fresh pasta.  I was speechless and almost a little skeptical thinking, 'he must be joking,' or 'he'll forget.' 

Low and behold ... he had NOT forgotten.  He got very excited planning out his pasta and how he wanted to flavor it, how to do it without a machine and exactly how to do the sauce.  

My husband and I have been together for 7 years and getting ready to celebrate our 1 year anniversary during the holidays. In all this time he has never gone to the extreme of cooking this amazing of a dinner.  I had to do a double take at the calendar: is this some anniversary, holiday or special day I didn't remember?  No ... but he was ready to do this meal.

I personally have never made my own pasta like this ... so I was naturally curious and very excited to see it all happen.

Start out with 2 cups of flour, add a nice handful of salt.  We added red pepper flakes to it at this point as well as we wanted our pasta to have a little kick.  Combine your dry ingredients and then make a little well in your flour.  

Next, add three eggs to the middle of the well you just made.  Now comes the playful part.

You want to take a fork and slowly begin whisking the eggs together and pulling in the flour slowly to combine all together.  

Keep doing this until you start forming a dough consistency.  

 Now you want to start playing.  This means, dig your hands in and start forming your dough!  At this point you can pull in all the flour mixture and start working the dough.

Keep mixing until you get it all combined.  The next step is to knead the dough to really get the gluten in the flour to start doing it's job. 

This is where the real work comes in.  You should really work up a sweat on this part.  Keep kneading that dough until you get a nice consistency.  (if using a mixer you could put your kneading attachment in and let it do all the work for you)

Do you notice the difference in the color and texture?  This is what we want.  And now that we've put our dough through a nice workout it's time to let it rest.  

Wrap your dough in some plastic wrap and allow to rest for an hour.  Yes, an entire hour.

Once rested your dough is ready to be rolled out.  Again, if using a pasta tool on your mixer it would do all the work for you here ... but alas no mixer so we are doing all this by hand.  (that's called "putting in the love")

Flatten out your dough ball and start rolling with your rolling pin.

Put some muscle into it.  The goal here is to get the pasta nice and thin; almost transparent.  So start rolling.  Then keep rolling.  Then roll some more.  

Now we've got a nice size sheet.  At this point to make it easier to manage, cut your sheet of dough in half and then continue to roll.  You want a nice thin, even layer of dough.

Not there yet!!!  At this point our toddler couldn't resist not being in on all the fun so insisted that she start making her own pasta.  Daddy gave her a little dough and let her try her hand at it.

Needless to say she is still working on her upper body strength.  ;)  

Once you have your dough at the right thickness you can begin making your pasta.  At this point it's time to get creative!!

You can make ravioli, farfalle, macaroni, angel hair ... and we chose fettuccine. But honestly the ideas are endless.  My husband used the pizza cutter to make quick time of it but a knife or cutter works just as well.  

And there you go.  Fresh pasta.  The great thing about this is you can make a bigger batch and freeze for later.  Fresh pasta will keep for a good, long time.  

As this was my husband's meal he made all the decisions.  Tonight he wanted a white sauce with meatballs.  And since we were going Italian, why not make some Italian meatballs?  

1/2 pound of mild Italian sausage and 1/2 pound lean ground beef.  Combine with some garlic, salt, pepper and Italian Seasoning ... then form into meatballs.

Now let me just say ... if this were me making meatballs they would be smaller; however my husband likes having the larger meatballs in his meals.  So out of a pound he made 5 big meatballs.  

Pre-heat the oven to 350 and bake these for about an hour.  (adjust cooking time for smaller meatballs)

The sauce was easy: 1 jar of store-bough Alfredo spiced up with garlic salt, Italian seasoning and crushed red pepper flakes.  To make it a little better he sauteed some white onion and mushroom slices and added into the sauce. 

Once the meatballs were about ready he started the pasta water.  You really want the water to come to a hard boil.  Add a handful of salt to season the water and then add in the fresh pasta.  Cook to al dente.

Once done: serve up!!

This was the final product as served to me by my husband.  It was delicious!!!  And honestly ... by going through this process I am no longer intimidated by making fresh pasta.  And I will say, we will be making more and more of it!

 

Cheers!!!