MAKING HOMEMADE SPAGHETTI PASTA

This weekend I was really in a mood to cook alot! I mixed up a batch of this french bread dough. I made one loaf of regular french bread to go with our supper. I rolled up one loaf of pizza bread. I rolled another one with ham and grated mozerella to eat for sandwiches for the week (sliced).

But, the most exciting thing I made was I made homemade spaghetti pasta. I used this pasta maker which a friend loaned me to try out.

You can find it on Amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/Imperia-SP150-Pasta-Machine/dp/B002ZWA15K/ref=sr_1_2?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1297708223&sr=1-2


I used the recipe in the box which was:

2 1/4 cups flour
3 eggs

I mixed this up with a little sprinkle of water and kneaded the dough until smooth. Formed the dough into a disk and wrapped in plastic wrap to rest in the fridge for about 20 minutes.

Then we rolled pieces of the dough into strips with a floured rolling pin according to the directions in the box, fed those strips into the pasta maker, and then made the spaghetti.  First, you set the pasta maker on setting #1, which is the widest setting and you feed the dough in.  You keep feeding the dough in and decreasing the flatness of the dough.  On our pasta maker we ended up on setting number 4, which was recommended for making spaghetti.  When those strips were flat enough, we fed those strips into the spaghetti cutter part of the pasta maker.

We cooked the spaghetti in salted water about 5 minutes and it was SO DELICIOUS. I never thought homemade noodles could ever taste like storebought pasta, but it really did. My husband actually liked it better than boxed spaghetti because he thought it grabbed on to the sauce better.

I highly recommed making your own pasta. I think you wouldn't even have to have a pasta maker. You could roll the strips very thin. Roll up like for a cinnamon roll, and slice thin, and proceed from there. I need to try it that way and see how it turns out. The noodles might not be perfect in size, but I bet the end result would be the same.

But, I'm going to use my Swagbucks to order it from Amazon since I already have $35 in free money which I earned from doing my Swagbuck searches.

Mama mia - pappa pia !
This recipe is linked to The Grocery Cart Challenge Recipe Swap