Home-Made Pasta

In the panoply of international cooking gadgets we received for Christmas, Mr A&N and I gained a pasta maker. We had put it on our Amazon wishlist and crossed our fingers, and were gifted it by my parents. The gift was less of a surprise than they intended: having paid extra for the gift wrapping and specifying we weren't to open it until Christmas, they then wrote on the card attached to the gift "Hope you enjoy your present - there's nothing like fresh pasta!". All gifts are gratefully received here, and we finally had a chance to turn the handle on the machine last weekend.


The ingredients for pasta are simple - flour and egg. You can fancify it to make it green (adding water from boiled spinach to the dough), red (water from boiled beetroot), or presumably another color derived from the left-overs of other boiled vegetable water. Our main intentions are to make our own ravioli but we haven't had the chance to get the ravioli-making kit to enable that. I'm a by-the-rules sort of person who wants to wait to attempt ravioli until we know it won't be a complete disaster, while Mr A&N is just e-a-g-e-r and was trying his hardest to get me to throw caution to the wind and just go for it. Sometimes it pays to be stubborn; I talked us down from that precipice and our first home-made pasta adventure involved a simple tagliatelli cut and bolognese sauce.


We didn't revolutionize the history of pasta with what we made, but we did prove to ourselves that the effort was worth it. Home-made pasta compared to dried (or even supermarket-fresh) is the difference between silk and satin; freshly-brewed and instant coffee; a 3-day weekend versus a 2-day weekend. It's subtly, and yet substantially, different. It is smoother in taste and lighter in texture without feeling you've gone as far as eating something delicate. It is the pasta of Italy, the reason that the non-descript restaurant you discovered during your last visit seemed to serve the best bowl of spaghetti you ever tasted.

The greatest mystery to me is how your average Italian grandmother can operate the thing on her own. The 3-foot long sheets of dough that had to be fed through the contraption needed to be both lightly fed through and gently grabbed at the other end, and at least at the novice stage we needed all hands on deck to prevent disaster. Frankly, I don't think I have the right Mediterranean genes to ever operate it on my own. Pasta will have to be a team effort in the A&N household the next time we want to go fresh, but it does add to the feelings of family togetherness that Italian food brings out in you anyway.