Going the distance: making homemade pasta

Yeah so long time no blogging.  I am well aware.  This is mostly because I upgraded from having a "pretend-sort-of-job" to "almost-real-job".  Now I have to do work at work and even sometimes do work at home.  THUS, we wind up here, with very little bloggy action.

So to remedy, I'd like to tell you all about the time not that long ago that I made homemade pasta using my new pasta maker that I got for Christmas!

Shiny new toy.

On my list of unnecessary but fun things to own (along with an ice cream maker and spiral slicer), we have the pasta machine.  This one is quite cool, you've got the main roller component for squishing down your dough, and then it has two cutters on the back.  One does spaghetti and the other is fettuccine (I think).   You clamp the heavy sucker to the counter and roll away!

So when it comes to the dough I searched around the web for basic egg-free vegan pasta recipes, which are pretty numerous and all generally about the same.  Along with your flour and water, the universal recommendation seems to be to add a pinch of turmeric for colour.  I used predominately white all-purpose flour with a little bit of whole wheat thrown in for some pretend healthy. 

D'oh!

The "fun" part comes before you get to even use the machine.  Once the dough is made you have to work it out for a good solid 10 minutes.  It's a heck of a forearm exercise I'll tell you!  Then you break it up into smaller sections and the rolling and cutting begins!  I hung the pasta over the cupboard doors to dry so it wouldn't stick together.

Not very glamorous...

A single recipe ended up making enough for two meals, so I bagged and refrigerated half, and cooked the other half for supper!

YUM!

All-in-all, I found the pasta maker to be pretty easy to use, and the pasta it made was pretty yummy!  However it is one of those things that I'm not sure how often I would go out of my way to make it.  The whole process was about 2 hours from beginning to end, which I would qualify as a very time consuming recipe.  But I feel the same way about samosas and green onion cakes.  There are some things that end up getting relegated to the weekend for this reason.

Kind eating!