Proud moment

Yesterday was a good day. A great day even. I finally decided to give homemade pasta a go. People had been telling me that it was indeed a very simple task but I was never convinced. I felt it would probably be a lot of faffing about and it would most definitely end in disappointment. Also, I don't have a pasta machine and thought that was pretty much a must. When I read Claudia Roden's Book of Jewish Food some time ago, it came to my attention that the Jews back in the days used to roll out their pasta dough. And I thought, well I suppose they must have done that in Italy too before the pasta machine was invented. And then yesterday, as I was flicking through Katie Caldesi's The Italian Cookery Course, I saw that she had written instructions for both hand cut pasta and machine cut pasta and the instructions were very clear and it seemed straight forward enough, so I thought, why not?

Her recipe said 100 g of flour to one egg, so I used 200 g of Doves Organic Pasta Flour (tipo '0') and 2 large Organic Eggs. I kneaded the dough for about 10 minutes and left it to rest wrapped in clingfilm for 30 minutes. Then I rolled it out until it was so thin that I could see my hand through it, rolled it up and cut it into strips. It put it straight into a large pot of salted boiling water and cooked it for 2 -3 minutes. Then tossed it in freshly made pesto and served it. I was going to make a salad to go with it and had set about marinating red onion in balsamic vinegar, but got so busy with the pasta that I didn't get the time. And I also wanted to eat the pasta as soon as possible while it was fresh from the pan. Even picky Master 10 liked it, and he was very worried beforehand!