First Entry: Home made pasta

Like so many stay-at-home moms, I need to be very thrifty in order to keep our family afloat. We don't buy a lot of extras, and as much as I would love to cruise the grocery store and purchase the most exotic cheeses and hams and fresh fish, I just can't. In addition, I can't afford to buy expensive kitchen gadgets like the ones Martha Stewart uses... instead, I garage sale hop!

My most recent acquisition: an electric pasta maker! This was such an exciting find because I have always wanted to make home made, dried pasta as Christmas gifts. (I saw Martha Stewart do this a few years ago on TV, and I thought it was the coolest idea.) The pasta maker is a "Pasta Perfetto 900," probably manufactured in the 90's. Took it home, washed it thoroughly, and plugged it in. With a little rigging of the lid mechanism, my husband got it to work perfectly.

There is really nothing to making home made pasta, especially if you can get your hands on an electric pasta machine. Basically, all I had to do was mix flour, eggs, water, salt and olive oil in the machine, let the pasta extrude, cut it off at the desired length, then dry it completely on the counter for a couple of days. Here are some pictures of the maker in action:


So far I have made elbow macaroni, spinach rigatoni, and tomato rigatoni. The plain egg noodle recipe was very easy to master. I only needed to adjust the dough a couple of times to get it right. The spinach pasta was a little more challenging. Here is something I discovered: If the pasta dough is too wet, it will extrude very slowly or even clog the machine. If the dough is too dry, the pasta will split as it comes out of the holes. It was hard to get the "wetness" correct on the spinach pasta. However, I did get it eventually:


We cooked a sample of the spinach and egg noodles tonight for dinner. They cooked perfectly, much to my surprise and relief. They seemed to soak up a lot more water than store-bought pasta, however. To serve, we sauteed garlic in olive oil, tossed in some fresh chopped basil, salt, pepper, and Parmesan cheese. It was delightful.

So YAY for my lawn sale pasta maker! In case you are reading, Martha, you can be thrifty and still make home made dried pasta! ;-)