A Week of Pasta

Homemade biscotti, homemade yellow squash and tomato sauce,
and penne (not homemade)

Last week I was away from blogging. After a quiet time with family on Labor Day, rest of the week turned into a chaos: teenager's school activities, college search, ACT, scholarships search, a job search for husband, helping our daughter with her college, my own job hunt, interrupted by couple of power outages were less than blog friendly. Each time I started to respond to the comments, I would be interrupted by some emergency. After it happened third time on the row, I decided it was a sign to take a break and take care of all things required my attention.  We were able to sort things out and make plans, and now I can get back to blogging and share some recipes. 

Homemade fettuccine and homemade pesto

My dear friends, please, come back for biscotti recipe... :)

See you,
Marina

Pasta (homemade)

Carrot-apple-ginger juice - for energy!

This post was written a few months ago when my parents still were here. Things have changed since, and you can see how from the crossed text. 
Remember Happy March 8th! post? It's not just a holiday, for us it is a big holiday, like another Christmas, which means some gifts. I got a few. 
Do you want to see some?

That made me happy!

***

For many years a word "pasta" gave me a shivering. Nothing "pasta" would raise my appetite, on contrary I would rather eat just a plain bread than pasta. Needless to say, I rarely cooked pasta at home, just when kids were asking bagging, not that often though.
Why is that? Many reasons, I would say, main being that pasta doesn't taste good. Didn't taste good to me until I discovered a home made pasta. Apparently, my taste buds were in dormant stage for the store bought pasta.
And then mom came to the rescue. 
And then to everybody's happiness pasta found a place in this home. 

Fettuccine (my favorite)

Pasta dough is easy to make even for a teenager.
Flour-eggs-pinch of salt-water-oil-mix-rest-roll-cut-cook-enjoy! See how easy, right?

Smooth dough

My mother's homemade pasta recipe:

Ingredients: 

• 3 cups of all purpose flour or 2 cups of all purpose and 1 cup of semolina flour
• 3 eggs
• 3 Tbsp cold water (she actually uses eggshell to measure water, so did I)
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 tsp salt

Mother said that this recipe she has learned from her mother, and it was always done by hands, but I use my food processor or a stand mixer (lazy me!). 
Mix all the ingredients and knead the dough for 10 minutes (even I do it with my hands!) 
Form a ball and cover it with plastic wrap for a minimum 30 minutes.  

Wrap the dough

Then knead it again and ... here I wish I had a pasta dough roller...  I let the Kitchen Aid pasta roller attachment to roll the dough until it has required paper thin desired thickness.  
Cut the dough and toss it with a little corn or regular flour (to prevent it from sticking).  

Spaghetti (son's favorite)

Boil a large amount of water, add salt and 2-3 Tbsp olive oil, add pasta, and cook 2-3 minutes (this is the time for the fresh pasta. Dry pasta needs to be cooked longer, about 5-7 minutes). 
I set the kitchen alarm for 2 minutes and taste it. 
Some like it "well done", we like it al dente (firm to the bite). 

Plain pasta

Then pasta is dressed with vegetables, sauses, or just olive oil and garlic and served hot.  
That is pasta I love, we all do.

Pasta with Feta cheese and olive oil: I ate it all!

Today I made it with parsley "pesto": 
I just put in the blender a handful of parsley, a handful of walnuts, 2 cloves garlic, and a small piece of Pecorino Romano cheese (my favorite!). 
I gave it a couple of pulses and added freshly squeezed lemon juice (from 1,5 lemons) and a tablespoon of a very good olive oil. 
Pulsed again, and pesto was done. 

Pasta with parsley "pesto"

When my work was done, for a moment I imagined myself in Italy... 
Music, roses, pasta...

A-ve Ma-ri-aaaa!!!

Until next time,
Cowboy Country Vegetarian