Pasta-rific

I love making lasagna.  There's just something about the pasta, meat, sauce and cheese combo that makes my mouth water and my heart warm.

A few years ago Chad and I picked up a pasta maker at a Sunday yard sale.  It was the best $2 I've ever spent! I even found a ravioli mold at one of our local thrift stores! I started making pasta (and ravioli) like crazy.  It was fun to make fresh pasta and I got a workout at the same time.  The only downfall was that I wasn't a pro at it.  So I would usually find my day gone after only making a few batches. That all changed when Chad, the sweetheart he is, bought me my Kitchenaid mixer. Can you hear the harps and angels singing?

Needless to say this took my pasta making to a whole new level.  Kitchenaid makes a great mixer and they have lots of attachments available to buy.  The first attachments I got were the pasta attachments.  It came in a set of three.  A flat roller, a fettuccine roller and a spaghetti roller.  Here you'll see I used the flat roller to shape the dough into long sheets for my lasagna.  Then all the leftover sheets I fed through the fettuccine roller.

Lasagna Noodles:
2 cups White Flour
2 Cups Wheat Flour
1/2 tsp Salt
Fresh herbs (oregano and basil)
Garlic
4 Eggs
4 TBS  Olive Oil
2 TBS water

I mixed everything together in the blender until it was nice and crumbly.  Sometimes you have to adjust the amount of water to get the consistency you want.  Too much water and you'll have a sticky dough that you can't work with.  Too little and the dough will be too crumbly and won't hold.  You have to get it just right.

I got mine to how I wanted it.  I took a handful and pressed the soft crumbs together to form a ball.  I worked the ball for about a minute and then put it on my counter to roll out.  I rolled it out thin enough to go through the largest setting on my flat roller.  Then the process starts.  I usually do a couple turns through the first setting.  Then I move to a thinner setting, putting the dough through once.  I then fold the flattened dough to form a rectangle and then put it through the larger setting again (this gets the final shape I want).  Then I put it through the lower setting again.  The result is a long section of dough that you can cut or put through another attachment.  I kept most of the sections the way they were so that I could use them for my lasagna.  But the rest I put through the fettuccine roller.

I left the pasta out to dry, but then decided to freeze it instead.  I was going to use it in a couple days anyway, so there was really no use drying it.

And that's about it.  I feel like I am forgetting something, but I am sure it will come to me later.

 ...coming soon...LASAGNA