More adventures: pasta

As I mentioned yesterday, this weekend Wright and I took on the daunting task of making pasta from scratch. Why, you may ask, would we do such a thing? Well, because it tastes better. And because it sounded kind of fun. And it was pouring outside. And Michael Ruhlman convinced us it was easy. And it was!

We started with eggs and flour (fresh eggs from the farmer's market - we used 4 medium brown eggs to 2 cups flour, plus more flour). And after a little bit of hand mixing (no, not with a hand mixer, with our actual hands), we ended up with this:

And somehow, within an hour or so, it turned into this:


How did that happen? Well, there was a lot of kneading.


It was pretty messy.

Then we split the dough into fourths and rolled it out as thin as possible. No, Wright does not have a rolling pin, so we used a bottle of wine. Then we cut the pasta into thin strips.

Looks like pasta, right?! Note flour-y wine bottle/rolling pin in the background.

Mmm... looks good, right? Nice and fresh! So at this point, we threw some sausage in a pan with garlic and took our roasted tomatoes out of the oven. We also got boiled water going. This all was probably a timing mistake, since our pasta got quite warm and maybe even a little sticky? I don't know. Didn't care at this point!

So then we tossed it all together with some oil and some basil.

And it was pretty much the best dinner ever. It really was - everything was just so flavorful and scrumptious! And even though our pasta was a little thick for some bites, it didn't matter. We ate the entire pot!!! And Wright bought a pasta roller the next day.