During the month of February, my family and I undertook the challenge of eating nothing but homemade, from-scratch meals, with a weekly exception for our Sunday brunch and one bonus meal. Seeing as we eat a lot of pasta, one of our challenges was what to do about the lack of noodles looming in our future.
Enter the homemade pasta recipes and a pasta machine.
I spent a month churning out everything from the super-easy lasagna noodles to the more time-intensive spinach-and-ricotta ravioli. After a month of at least two pasta dishes a week, I came to a conclusion: fresh pasta is amazing.
Never before had I imagined that pasta was supposed to have a subtle overtone of herbs and sea salt. It was supposed to spring at the tooth (a true al dente), not mush into the crevices in your molars. It was supposed to hold sauce, not swim in it.
To be fair, it takes a lot of hard work and foresight. Each batch of dough is divided into four pieces; each of those pieces is run through the pasta machine no less than 12 times to bring it to the proper thickness. After being properly flattened, it still needs to be cut and dried for at least one hour.
Despite the obvious difference is the amount of labor required, fresh pasta is worth the searing pain in your forearms. Fresh pasta for the win!
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