Pasta-Making Adventure

A couple of weeks ago my MIL and I decided that we would take on the challenge of making homemade pasta, something neither of us had done before. She had found a delicious-sounding recipe, and being inspired by it she researched and found a great deal for a pasta-roller. Once it arrived, we gathered the ingredients and went to work on (attempting) to create
a delicious dinner of homemade

cheese ravioli with mushroom sauce.
(yummmm!)

I wasn't able to take pictures while we were working (It was just too difficult to try to document at the same time! My brain was already stretched to capacity!), but I found some images that do a great job of depicting the pasta-making process we endured.

We started with some of this:

which is flour, eggs, salt and evoo (extra-virgin olive oil for those of you who aren't aware of Rachael Ray's now infamous abbreviations!). You mound the flour into a big circle with a hole (or well) in the center. You crack the eggs into the well, add the salt and oil, and then attempt to beat the eggs without incorporating the flour. Yet

After the eggs are beaten, you slowly add the flour in,

trying to create a mixture that gets progressively thicker, with the goal of incorporating the flour in such a way that once the rim is broken, the mixture is thick enough that it will not slip through the now-breached border and run down the counter and onto the floor.
It took us a while, but we were able to accomplish this:

It took us a while but we were just happy
not to end up with egg on the floor (or on our face...hee hee).

After working and kneading the dough ball for, oh, about 20 minutes, or until our arms felt like rubber, we wrapped it in saran wrap and let it rest for an hour.

We thought it might also be good if we took that opportunity to rest ourselves :)

It was at this point in the process that we decided it would go more smoothly with a whole bunch of this:
Mmmm, coffee!! And not just any coffee, but delicious homemade illy brand espresso added to perfectly frothed milk (all made possible by Bonnie's Christmas present of a delightful new Breville espresso maker...seriously, the thing coffee dreams are made of!), creating a
completely delightful and perfect cappuccino. Yum!

If you are wondering what had exhausted us to the point that we needed to rest right along with the dough, that would be the large amount of kneading needed. It was not a pretty thing to watch, nor was it our favorite step. We had to switch back and forth for the kneading a few times-- pasta dough is t.o.u.g.h. at this stage, and kneading it for more than 5 minutes at a time would require much stronger arms than we apparently had...whew!

We did rationalize, however, that the work we were putting into this dough completely justified the delicious high-calorie, cheesy, carb-loaded meal we would (hopefully) be consuming in just a few hours!

After we had sufficiently rested our arms and the pasta, we cut the dough into 4 pieces, took one and rolled it slightly so that it would fit more easily into the pasta roller.
We were surprised and very pleased to find that the dough had softened up significantly during its rest, because neither of us were looking forward to working with, or, frankly, eating, dough that was as tough as quick-drying cement.
We then fed it into the newly-acquired pasta roller,

for it's virgin voyage.
And while I'd love to tell you it looked like this right from the beginning:

(Doesn't that baby look happy?! I would, too, with yards of pasta dangling over me!)
In truth, it actually looked more like this. . .
This process took us a while to master, and our first few attempts left us with lumpy pasta with uneven, curly edges, and a large rounded crescent shape

instead of the long, smooth rectangle they showed (flaunted) in the recipe.
However after the first 2 or 3 runs, we finally created something that looked a bit more like this:

We did learn a few things about the art of pasta rolling, however, that I will pass on to you. First is that you have to be skilled/experienced/have 3 hands if you are going to attempt to do it by yourself. We thought it worked very well to have one person feeding the thicker dough in from the top, and catching the thinned out dough from the bottom, while the other person turned the crank, while trying to keep the crank itself from falling out and smashing unsuspecting feet.

Our recipe said to continue passing the dough through the increasingly thinner settings of the pasta roller, until you reach the second-thinnest setting. For our machine, that meant starting at setting #1 and continuing to setting #8. Which is not only a lot of passes through the machine, but also results in a v-e-r-y thin ribbon of dough, hard to handle, quick to dry out and easy to tear.

After processing all our dough to this level of thickness (or thin-ness), we decided that next time we'd stop at level 6 or 7 in order to have dough that is easier to work with. Nevertheless, we covered all but two sheets of our pasta with damp towels, and began to squeeze the chilled filling (a delightful mixture of ricotta, eggs, parsley and 2 kinds of cheeses) onto the sheets:

This was by far the most time-consuming of the stages , and we would have given anything to have one of these:

or even one of these:

If we had one of these tools, it would have made our lives easier, the filling step much quicker, and our finished ravioli might have looked like this:

instead of this:

The important thing, however, is not how it looks, but how it tastes, and we were certain that our lumpy, torn, misshapen raviolis would taste just as good as the pretty, uniform type. One upside to the good, old-fashioned way we filled our ravioli was that we ended up with lots of scraps of dough... which may or may not have been eaten by the cooks as a (we felt) well-deserved appetizer! :)

To complete our process, we whipped up a delightful sauce of pancetta (a cured ham like
bacon but not smoked), three types of mushrooms:

and

chicken stock, cream and green onions.
We boiled our ravioli, piled them into a serving dish, poured the wonderfully rich sauce over top, called our men to the table,

and devoured it!
(*Happy sigh just remembering the deliciousness...*)

Not only was the ravioli perfectly cooked, and the sauce to-die-for, we felt very proud to be eating such a luxurious dish that we made entirely from scratch!
It's true it was a lot of work, and it's also true that we decided that next time we might just add all of the ingredients to a layered lasagna-type dish to avoid the most time-consuming part of stuffing the raviolis, BUT the end result was most satisfying!

I hope you enjoyed reading about our adventures in pasta-land, and that it didn't scare you off but rather encouraged you to try some culinary adventure of your own! I'd love to hear what you are dying to make, and how it turns out!