Adventures in Pasta Making

I spent my Christmas in Ft. Myers, FL with my parents.  With beautiful 80+ degree weather, blue skies, and lots of sunshine - it was a great way to spend Christmas!  Little did I know it, but Santa actually visits motor homes, too!  If you're wondering, he comes in through the furnace (not the exhaust pipe, as some might think).  This year, Santa brought me a really fun present!  A pasta maker!  So, naturally, the first day home I spent several hours in my kitchen teaching myself how to make pasta.  It is SO EASY.  It won't take several hours every time, but the first time always takes the longest.

Here's my step-by-step teaching myself how to make pasta tutorial!

Basic Pasta Ingredients: (from the book that came with my pasta maker)

Per Person:

125 grams of flour

1 egg

1.  Measure your flour.

2.  Add flour to your bowl, making a small well in the middle.

3.  Add the egg into the little well.

4.  Use a fork to mix the egg and flour.

5.  Add water if necessary until you get a nice firm dough.  (I added about 2 tbsp of water)

6.  In small sections, run the pasta through your pasta maker.  Start off running it through a few times on the widest setting.  Then turn it down a notch, run it through, turn it down another notch, run it through, etc.  Continue until the pasta is the desired thickness.

7.  Play around!  This was my first batch of dough.  I tried running it through the fettuccine cutter, the regular spaghetti cutter, and making a ravioli.

8.  For ravioli, I cut squares the size I wanted out of the pasta.  Then I used my 1 tablespoon scooper to add the filling.  My filling is a puree of roasted mushrooms, mozzarella cheese, garlic, and olive oil.

9.  Add the second square on top. 

10.  Use a ravioli stamp to seal.  Trim the edges.  I also played around with using a biscuit cutter and then sealing the edges with a fork.  That worked well too!

11.  Place the raviolis on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper.   Freeze until ready to use!

12.  Pop the frozen raviolis into boiling water for 4-6 minutes.

13.  Smother with super healthy pasta sauce.

YUM!

This was much, much easier than I had expected it to be.  They froze really well, and cooked up quick.  It'd be easy to spend a Sunday afternoon making a big batch of ravioli to freeze!  

I also made a batch of fettuccine, let it dry overnight, and then cooked it a few days later.  It was delicious, too!

Find more recipes at Tasty Tuesday!