Italian Homemaker Pasta - Success #1

I DID IT!!!

No, I didn't run a marathon. No, I didn't get permanent employment. No, I didn't get married. No, I didn't bring a baby bundle of joy into the universe.

Stop making me feel bad already, jeez!!! I get enough of that perusing my Facebook. Ahem. Anyway. Wanna know what I did?!?!

....

I successfully made homemade pasta from scratch!

Yep. I'm officially awesome and ready to retire from life now. But there's still so much homemade pasta to make and eat throughout the course of my lifetime, so I'll stick it out a little longer.

Reminds me of those drawing exercises I had to do in art class, where one puts an egg under a light and sketches it. But this is better because eventually you get pasta at the end.

     Any of you ever tried to make pie crust? Ugh. It's the worst. I've tried several recipes several times over the course of the last couple years and I still have yet to get it right. It gets too moist, or too dry, and it's impossible to roll out, and then you bake it for too long, or not long enough, and no matter how hard you try, it always ends up dry and crumbly instead of light and flaky, and then you break out from the stress and lie awake at night with tears running down your pimply face wondering if life will ever get better. SCREW YOU PIE DOUGH!!!!

I made these?!?!

    But pasta dough isn't anything like that. Pasta dough is super chill. It's all like, "Hey. You wanna roll me out nice and thin and have an easy time cutting me by hand? Sure. No prob. I'm easy."

     It was time consuming, but way easier than I thought it was going to be. I thought I would go to sleep that night as a pimply-er version of myself. Instead, I went to bed as Ruler of the Universe.

It's like a dormant volcano of num nums.

I used mostly egg yolks (5 of them I think, leftover from an egg white omelette), plus two full eggs.

Hello, beautiful.

Poured them into 1 3/4 cup flour, with a crater in the middle.

The idea is that you whisk the eggs within the well, slowly drawing in flour from the sides.



But, Murphy's Law --- I busted the sides. The levee broke. And egg ran EVERYWHERE. I thought I was doomed. But pasta-dough-to-be was all like, "Hey, you messed up. That's okay. I'm still gonna form a perfect ball of dough for you. Because I like ya, kid".

And he did.




    Once I had kneaded a doughy ball of perfection, I wrapped it in plastic wrap and let it hang out in the fridge for an hour to rest. Brought it closer to room temperature, then sliced it into 5 or 6 sections for rolling out.

I'll have to run through the whole shebang with you guys once I have a photographer. The process of rolling out and cutting is best shared visually.

Until then, I will share with you the moral(s) of the story:

1.) Making homemade pasta dough is actually possible, even completely by hand.
2.) Homemade pasta dough is really yummy.
3.) Can't put store-bought sauce on it. It's sinful. Make from scratch, like yours truly. It's actually surprisingly easy (Also will go through this in a subsequent post)

If I had an Italian grandmother, I bet she'd be super proud.

As a final thought: If not-very-active-on-Facebook-boyfriend posts this:

You better believe I'll be making homemade pasta again soon.