#6 - Homemade Pasta with Pesto

After a long week at work nothing is better than a lazy weekend. Usually our Saturdays are filled with Hoyas games and other errands to run, so Sunday is often our day to relax at home. This week was the first time in a long while that there was no basketball on Saturday, which meant we could have a lazy Saturday and still have the energy to create something new today. So we thought we would go all out and make homemade pasta, something we've been wanting to do forever.

Homemade Pasta with Pesto

From The Classic Pasta Cookbook and the Villa Cookbook For homemade pasta you only need three ingredients- eggs, flour and several hours of time. Oh, and a lot of patience. But it's kinda hard to take a picture of those last two.Some people use their KitchenAid to mix up the pasta dough. We have watched too many Top Chef and Iron Chef episodes to do it that way, so we chose to go professional and make a nest of flour and eggs.
Even though Chef Anne Burrell says that it's the only way to make pasta, it really is a difficult thing to do. We had a few mishaps along the way, but in the end our dough seemed to come out like we wanted.
We didn't use our KitchenAid to make the dough, but there was no way we weren't going to use our KitchenAid pasta maker attachments to roll and cut the pasta.
The first strip that we made was pretty nerve-wrecking, but once we got the hang of it, we felt pretty comfortable cranking out more pasta.
After we had a few strips, it was time to cut the sheets into what we wanted for our meal. We had gotten a spaghetti cutter attachment so that's what we used. It ended up coming out super thin, and more like tagliolini than spaghetti, but it all worked out fine in the end.
To go with our homemade pasta, we decided we wanted to have a simple sauce so we could really taste the fresh pasta. So we chose pesto, which we wouldn't usually make in the winter time.

We already have a pretty good pesto recipe from the Villa Cookbook that we make when we have a live basil plant. And since that doesn't count as a new recipe, we didn't take any pictures of us making the sauce. But we'll give you the recipe for that too because it's pretty good.

(Note: lack of pesto-making picture)
All in all, the time and effort that went into making the fresh pasta was worth it because you could taste the difference, and it was delicious. That said, we're not going to make fresh pasta again anytime soon.

Here's the long recipe (Makes about 1 lb of pasta):

Homemade Pasta

Ingredients

• 3 large eggs
• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

Preparation

1. Pour the flour into a mound on a wooden surface, and form a well in the middle with your hand.
2. Break the eggs, one at a time, into the center of the well.
3. Beat the eggs with a fork until it is completely mixed, making sure not to break the wall.
4. Gradually, incorporate the flour into the egg mixture, being careful not to break the walls entirely.
5. Use both hands to fold in the remaining flour over the egg mixture.
6. Start working the dough until all the flour and egg is mixed together. Add more flour if needed.
7. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and clear your work surface.
8. Unwrap your dough and begin kneading by folding the dough over one hand, pushing it away from you with the palm of your other hand, and then rotating the dough 90 degrees.
9. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap again, and let it rest for at least 20 minutes.
10. Roll the pasta according to your machine's instructions.
11. Cut the pasta using another machine or by hand.
12. Cook the pasta in salted water until al dente.

And as promised, here's the pesto recipe too:

Pesto

Ingredients

• 2 cloves of garlic, peeled
• 3 cups fresh basil leaves
• 1/2 cup pine nuts
• 1/4 tsp salt
• Black pepper
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1/2 cup grated Parmigiano

Preparation

1. With food processor running, drop in the cloves of garlic and chop finely.
2. After scraping work bowl, add basil, pine nuts, salt, and pepper.
3. Pulse several times and scrape work bowl.
4. With food processor running, slowly add olive oil until mixture becomes mostly smooth.
5. Toss pesto and Parmigiano with hot pasta.