When I first started blogging, I had a theme for each day of the week (Monday-Friday). Somehow, that got lost along the way. I've decided to try that again. So... Welcome to "Delicious Monday" !
The other night I felt ambitious and decided to make homemade pasta. Thanks to modern machinery, it was a lot easier than it sounds and the results were superb, if I do say so myself.
Pasta recipe:
2 cups of flour (I used 1 cup of all-purpose and 1 cup of semolina).
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. Olive oil
2 Eggs
Water
Put the two beaten eggs into a 1 cup measuring cup, add the olive oil and then fill the rest of the measuring cup with water. You can always add more water if the dough is too dry.
Next I put the flour and salt into the machine’s mixing container and set it to mix. Then, the trick was to add the egg/oil/water mixture very slowly, one-third at a time. That way the dough mixed evenly. This took about three or four minutes – and I did have to add just a bit of extra water to get it to the proper “crumble” consistency (where the mixture had clumps the size of peas that, when pressed together, formed a dough that wasn’t too wet or too crumbly).
Once it reached “crumble” consistency, I set the machine to extrude the pasta.
It was that easy.
We topped it with homemade pesto:
2 cups of basil, leaves only, washed and dried
3 medium cloves of garlic
¾ cup raw pine nuts
1 cup freshly grated, loosely packed Parmigiano-Reggiano 4 tablespoons of extra-virgin Olive oil (add more to taste)
1/2 teaspoon pepper
Pulse garlic in a food processor until finely chopped, then add nuts, cheese, a large handful of basil, and pepper and process until chopped. Add remaining basil one handful at a time, pulsing after each addition, until finely chopped. With motor running, add oil and blend until incorporated.