Making Pasta!

This week the kids and I made our own pasta for fettuccine alfredo. It was going to be chicken and noodles but I changed my mind at the last second when I realized I had everything to make alfredo sauce.

This is a simple pasta recipe- flour, eggs, salt and a little milk.

Stirring it all up.

The first kneading. It takes about ten minutes of kneading to release the gluten so it feels a little bouncy.

We let it rest & relax for about a half hour (no picture) covered with a damp tea towel.

Then another round of kneading until it's smooth and ready to roll out. 

We rolled ours to about 1/2 inch thick, but normally it would be more like 1/4 inch. With a rolling gadget it's much easier to get the perfect thickness, but I kind of like the rolling process when doing this with the kids. And the thicker dough is actually a bit easier for the kids to eat when it's cooked.

After flouring the top surface of the rolled out dough, it gets folded up until it's one giant jelly roll. The flour makes sure it doesn't stick to itself.

Then we slice! Each slice unrolls into very long pasta strips. Most have to be cut in half before hanging.

We cut the pasta a little wide to use as fettuccini noodles. Here they are hanging on the pasta drying rack. You can cook them right away, freeze them, or dry them for about 2 hours to use later. 

Since they were a bit thicker they cooked perfectly in about 12 minutes. The kids loved the long thick noodles and named the baby sized ones Oskar and Elijah as we were hanging them. :-)

Tomatoes, steamed broccoli, grilled chicken strips and just finished alfredo sauce over handmade fettuccine pasta made a lovely lunch that everyone enjoyed!