Pasta Making Lesson #1

Get all of your ingredients and equipment together...

 in the location you plan to make and dry the noodles. In our case I hauled them down the hill to my parents' cabin which is prime pasta-making territory.
(Just to clarify, the dog is neither an ingredient or equipment, just a gratuitous cute pet cameo. )

It must be Spring Vol. I

A few days ago we experienced a first here on the farm...our first 100-egg day!

It is rather a banner event, but at the same time, what the heck are we going to do with all those eggs? If it was market or CSA season, it wouldn't be an issue, but its not. So when life gives you too many eggs, our default solution is to make noodles!
So we did and we tried out a new drying method that we think is an improvement over the "drying them on every horizontal surface in the cabin" method. Isn't this why they call it a drying rack?


And the bonus is that as the noodles dry, they eject themselves from the drying rack onto the nice clean bed-sheet on the floor. (Don't worry Mom, I'll wash the sheet before you have visitors!)

Noodle Day

With our hens finally increasing their egg production and our pullets starting to lay their first eggs, we are finally getting buried in "chicken seeds" again. We can only eat so many omelets, so celebrate the occasion I declared that today was Noodle Day!

Since my very lucky purchase last year of the $12 pasta maker, and my realization (duh!) that I can make the dough in my KitchenAid, pasta-making isn't quite the major chore that it used to be. However it is still a significant event that generally involves my taking over my parent's cabin so that I have enough surfaces to dry the cut noodles. Mom & Dad are in town for the weekend, so I took advantage of the situation and made a mess.

I sure hope they don't come back early : )
This should mean that we will have Herbed Whole Wheat Noodles to sell at the early farmers market! Woo hoo!

Oodles of Noodles

Last week I did a test run of the new (to me) Atlas 150 pasta maker with the recipe from the directions. There is a slight learning curve as far as getting the dough consistency and flouring right, but once you have a grip on that it's a breeze!

So, feeling emboldened after the test flight we dove right into this year's Pasta Making Marathon. I was concerned that my pasta recipe would be too much for the Atlas to handle as it uses whole wheat flour and a bunch of dried herbs. (The recipe that came with the machine used ONLY flour and eggs, no salt, nothing!) So I tentively made a half batch of my recipe and carefully fed it into the Atlas and...SHAZAM! Out came a beautiful sheet of smooth noodle dough. Then with equal trepidation, into the cutters it went...no worries there either! Out came the most beautiful, perfect noodles I've ever made and in a fraction of the time it took to roll and cut them by hand. The bonus is that because they are all exactly the same thickness and cut, they will cook more evenly too.

Sheets of pasta feeding into the cutters

Pasta coming off cutters onto bamboo skewers for drying

We made about 9 pounds of pasta so that will be 18 packages that we can take to the upcoming Winter Market (minus the ones we eat between now and then!)

Our new pasta drying system (much improved over covering every horizontal surface in the cabin with bed sheets and drying pasta!

Atlas Pasta Maker

We were already planning on our annual Noodle-Making Marathon for next week. We have to plan ahead because the noodles take over every raised horizontal surface for at least two days while they dry. Its a little crazy because we always did it all by hand and it took all day long...but not anymore!

Today while running a few errands we stopped at an area thrift store and there on a back shelf, in a battered box marked with the words OMC Atlas from Italy, was a beautifully made, stainless-steel pasta maker.

It has attached cutters for making fettuccine and spaghetti and you can buy a whole assortment of other attachments for it. I can't wait to try it out! If anyone has suggestions for good pasta recipes, please share. We'll start with our traditional and Herbed Whole Wheat noodles, but other favorite recipes are welcome! And if you have experience with this specific pasta maker, let us know what you think about it.

I'll post pictures of the new toy in use sometime next week...wish me luck!