June… Time to Learn a New Skill

I have been eager to learn a new skill or two. With the start of a new month and my reflection of the quarantine time, I felt that now was as good as any other time to learn something new.

During the “Stay at Home” order, I saw many people taking advantage of the additional time at home with efforts to improve their kitchen skills. I must say that I definitly joined the bandwagon and really enjoyed cooking with different ingredients and changing up our day-to-day meals. During that time, I did not learn how to make everything that I had wanted to cook on my list. So this was a little motivation for me to enhance my skills in the kitchen.

For the month of June, join me as I learn how to make pasta from scratch. Each week, I will be documenting my progress. I am going to change it up each week by using a different recipe, changing up the noodle type or some other variation.

Take a look into what happened with my first attempt at making pasta.

Week #1

I purchased a simple, manual pasta maker. It was on sale and seemed to have good reviews. To make the drying stage a little easier, I also purchased a pasta drying rack. While doing my pasta research, I went to one of my favorite go-to websites for recipes, kitchn. I knew that I would find a recipe that wasn’t too complicated and would be easy to follow. Thankfully, the website came through for me and I used this recipe.

It’s kind of fabulous that pasta calls for just a few ingredients that I always have at home, flour, eggs and a dash of salt. I was pleased that the whisking and kneading process went well. The 30 minute time allotment for the dough to rest allowed me to get ready for the next stage of the process, which called for the use of the pasta maker.

To be honest, as I began to feed the dough through the pasta maker, I felt that the dough was too thin. When that occurred, I would Kneaders the dough again and it seem to improve the sheet of dough once it had gone through the hand crank pasta maker. I did use the noodle attachment to make spaghetti, but soon derided, it was easier for me to work with a wider noodle. I used the roller to cut the noodles on my own. Why this made for some imperfect shapes, it was by far better for me to work with as I began to move the pasta from the cutting board to the drying rack. I was impressed with the amount of pasta that can hang on the drying rack. If you plan on making pasta, I highly recommend purchasing this item. It made the process a little easier for me.

Since I had the time, I went ahead and cooked the pasta. The pasta cooked quickly and was ready in 5 minutes! I added pesto sauce to the finished product and enjoyed the meal.

I definitly laughed throughout my first attempt at making pasta. I can guarantee that the process didn’t look like what you would see in a magazine or on a cooking show, but hey, it was edible and I want to continue improving my pasta making skills. I am calling this first week a success.

For my next attempt, I am going to knead the dough longer. I feel that I had not worked the dough enough to get the best dough to work with. I am curious how the pasta will change with a different recipe and with one attempt under my belt.

I was lucky enough to have one of my little sidekicks help with the pasta making (Lucky for me our kids love pasta just as much as I do). Everyone in our household tried the pasta. 3 out of the 4 of us thought that the pasta tasted good and that it was better than expected. (If you were wondering, it was Lillian who wasn’t so sure about how the pasta tasted.)

Check back next week to see what happens with my next attempt with making pasta!

If you have any tips or recommendations of pasta that I should make, leave a note in the comments!