Homemade Pasta - Round Two!

Our first foray into making pasta didn't go that well. It tasted good, but was a sticky mess and jammed up our new pasta machine. We were at our friends Joe and Calla's for dinner last weekend and they had made great pasta. So, we knew it was time to get back at it! This time, we had some good advice from Joe and Calla, and we'd watched some videos on YouTube. The old adage 'A picture is worth a thousand words' seems to be very true for us when it comes to making pasta. We had a few 'aha' moments and the second try at making pasta went much, much better. Check out Jamie Oliver making pasta here and some other guy here. It's really quite easy when you know what you're doing! And quite fast! The basic recipe: 100 grams of flour and one egg per person. We actually had a lot of pasta for the two of us. The secret seems to be dusting with lots of flour as you run it through the machine. We tried Jamie's way of cutting the pasta by hand instead of changing over the machine to the pasta cutter. We cut it at about fettuccine width (we thought) by it cooked up super fat at about an inch wide! Maybe we overcooked it. Nonetheless, is was not a big lump and it was very tasty! We'll do that again, soon! The pasta was using local flour and our eggs (the sauce was totally not local - we won't even go there). Give the videos a watch, and then try it yourself!

Dark Days Challenge: Week 6

It was kind of a no-brainer. We love pasta; the simplest recipe involves just flour and eggs, both of which we have from local sources. So, an Imperia pasta machine arrived in the mail this week. Thanks to all the Dark Days Challenge participants who responded to my query about types and hints. We went with the Imperia because it's the brand carried by one of favorite Canadian kitchen supply stores, Golda's Kitchen. They've got lots of different attachments but we went with the basic machine, which will make spaghetti and lasagna and we added the ravioli maker.

There is, I must say, a bit of a learning curve. We managed to jam up the machine trying to get lasagna out! Apparently, on further research after the fact, our dough was still too wet, we hadn't passed it through the sheet maker enough while adding a little extra flour. You can't see it in the finished picture because of the sauce, but our lasagna was a little crimped, some pieces were very short and some pieces were stuck in lumps. We need a better way to dry the finished product - we were trying to drape it over over turned mixing bowls. Our first batch was made with our local, organic, all-purpose unbleached flour because that is what we had. Since then, I went on a little pantry-restocking foray to Two Farm Kids and did find some local Durum Semolina.

We didn't make tomato sauce this summer but we did have, in the freezer, some homemade Hubbard Squash/Apple/Bacon soup, which had thickened up in the pot while we ate. We thought it would make a good pasta sauce - and we were right! We didn't do anything to it except de-frost and then warm it up. We topped it with some more home-grown bacon. It was yummy!! We will certainly do more squash pasta sauces! The original recipe for Hubbard Squash soup is here. And this coming summer, I will certainly try canning tomato sauce for the first time. Wish me luck!

Also, on the dinner table this week - our comfort food for snowy weather: meatloaf. We used our homegrown ground pork and mixed it with some awesome bison from Crocusview Farms. We got our pork as 'regular' not lean, and it is rather fatty. Mixing it with an equal amount of the drier bison was perfect. To keep it local, we topped it with our homegrown bacon, instead of the usual ketchup/mustard mix. I always thought topping meatloaf with bacon was a bit of meat overload, but now I get it. It added great flavor to the dish. We served it with a simple one dish roast of homegrown potatoes, Australian blue pumpkin, parsnips from our market buddy Hugh and our own carrots and onions.