First attempt at Pasta

So today I learned a few things about making pasta. First of all, it's not all that complicated. second it will come out much better if you have a rolling pin or pasta machine. But we'll get into that later.First let's take a step by step view of how this goes.

The first step is to mix up the eggs. You can either use whole eggs or twice as many yolks. So if you're making 5 cups of flour you would either use 6 eggs or 12 egg yolks. It will change the texture and give it a burst of color.

Ideally you'll start mixing the flour into the egg little by little so the egg doesn't escape. I was doing a pretty small amount of dough and that may have been my demise. Or maybe the lack of proper kitchen utensils. Could be any number of reasons but basically you want it to wind up looking like this:

I nice little bundle of love. The color may vary depending on what kind of eggs you use as well as whether you use whole eggs or just the yolks. After that you need to roll it out. This is where my downfall truly began.

By some strange twist of fate I happen to not have a rolling pin or a pasta machine either of which would have made this much better. Instead I used my little measuring cup because it was the only thing that was about the right shape and wouldn't get destroyed when I rolled out the dough. The end result, however, was an incredibly thick noodle.

Not terrible but not terribly attractive. I suppose it could have been much worse! So I got the water boiling with a bit of olive oil to make sure it didn't clump up. If you but a good packaged pasta, oil in the water will not be necessary but for fresh pasta it's pretty essential, I'm told.

So while the pasta was cooking I decided to make a simple butter pasta so I got my diced red onion going. I used red onion and not too small because I like having a bit of that crunch in there.

Once the onion got nice and soft I threw in some asparagus pieces for a few seconds before tossing the pasta in there to soak it all up. I also wanted to give it some color because it just doesn't come out the same if it hasn't gone through the pasta machine a few times. Oh yeah, and a nice hunk of butter because everything tastes better when you use butter. That's butter, not melted plastic made to look like butter, that's real honest-to-goodness unsalted butter.

The end result was not completely embarrassing. Of course, the use of butter, garlic and onion makes messing this completely up pretty difficult. The texture was a little off because of the thickness of the pasta, it just didn't develop as I'd hoped. But other than that, it was quite good!

Just remember, there's no shame in not doing perfectly the first time you make it. This is one of those things that are so cheap and easy to make that it won't hurt if it doesn't come out perfectly. This was 1 cup of flour, 1 egg and 1/2 a tspn of salt. Nice, cheap and easy. Seeing the amount of time it took to make, I think I will spring for the pasta machine. This can be a quick and easy meal that I can throw together in a crunch.

Have you made pasta? Tell me about it!