Pasta

Thanks very much to my dear sister, we had fresh pasta for dinner last night. I don't have it on tape, but Brynna saying "pasta" downright cute. Actually, just about everything she says these days is cute, owing largely to the earnestness with which she utters everything, but also to the fact that she lacks the ability to form about half of the necessary sounds.

Anyway, on to the "BAA'tah!"

The dough is pretty simple: eggs, flour, a little water, some mixing, and some kneading. Let it rest in the fridge for a little while, then break it up into some smaller bits. Pat it out into thick pads.

My sister's gift was the pasta mill attachments for the stand-up mixer. The first of these is the thickness roller - a pair of cylindrical drums that the mixer's motor turns. A dial on the end lets you set the thickness. It might take a moment to get the dough to catch in the rollers, but when it does, the machine does most of the work. All it takes is a little handling to keep things feeding along.

With each pass, the rollers get put closer together, and the dough gets longer and thinner. In order to make the noodles a manageable length, now is a good time to cut the dough into manageable lengths.

Then we switch from the flat roller attachment to one of several possible pasta cutting attachments. We chose fettucini. These work very much like the cutters in a paper shredder - sort of a rolling set of scissors. One problem we haven't quite figured out yet is how best to handle the finished noodles. They have a tendency to stick to whatever they are put on - and to each other. On the other hand, it takes time to roll and cut each sheet of noodles, and a sheet isn't quite enough for a serving, so we probably can't just drop them directly into the pasta water.

Really, in the grand scheme of things, this isn't such a bad problem to have.