Even with the copious amounts of storage we have in our kitchen we never seem to have enough room especially for storing those occasionally used kitchen gadgets.  For this reason I have resisted for a long time investing in a pasta machine but I caved in recently on the grounds that I find the fresh pasta you can buy in the supermarket increasingly unpalatable and his Lordship does like a good ravioli.  Of course it was only proper I should present him with a pasta machine for his birthday in July.

After a couple of attempts – ravioli and fettucine – I am now a total convert.  You can’t beat pasta made fresh right in your kitchen and I’m sure that after a little more practice we’ll have it down to a fine art.  Admittedly you do  need to allow about an hour to make the dough, rest it and then fiddle on with the machine but it’s quite therapeutic. And like all good things in life a little patience goes a long way.

The pasta dough is ridiculously easy.  Flour (fine grade -00), beaten fresh egg (preferably from your own back yard) and water (clean and green from your own filtered supply)! You mix and then kneed for about 10 minutes until the dough is silky smooth before resting.  Recipes seem to vary on how long to rest ranging from 10 minutes to half an hour.  I’ve done both and the taste was equally good.

I have found my heavyweight vintage porcelain rolling pin works wonder on the dough.  This is one of my favourite kitchen gadgets that I inherited from my mum.  I think it has holes in so you can put ice in for chilling when making pastry.  That or it had wooden handles which are now long gone.

As much as I love my rolling pin I am starting to love our pasta machine as much.  When you’ve rolled the dough into a wide strip flat enough to feed into the machine it’s just a question of feeding it into the machine and turning the handle.  You gradually decrease the gap between the rollers so the dough becomes increasingly thinner.  When you have it to the thickness you like you can either make ravioli by putting your mixture on the dough evenly spaced out and then cover over and seal, or, you can place it through the pasta machine cutter to make fettucine and spaghetti.  I think there are other attachments you can buy to get even fancier shapes.  You can of course simply use the rolled down cut down to make lasagne sheets.

You hang your pasta to dry on its own drying rack.  And it wasn’t as fiddly as I expected although I suspect making spaghetti will be fun!

I rustled up a quick bacon, mushroom, cheese and cream sauce with leftover ingredients from the weekend.

All up I think this took about an hour to prepare and around 5 minutes to eat!

When we get our new chest deep freezer I can see us making extra pasta and freezing for those nights when his Lordship is left to self catering in the week.  I know for sure he won’t start fiddling with making pasta from scratch but the fresh version comes in handy beats the dried pasta hands down every time.

Some time ago we bought the Silver Spoon Cookbook which is the Italian version of a Good Housekeeping Cookbook from our favourite bookshop so we’ll be trying out lots more authentic Italian recipes.  Interestingly in this edition there is a section a the back with renown Italian Chefs and would you believe that one of the featured chefs is Maria Pia who has a fabulous Italian Restaurant in Wellington which we are known to frequent for those rather special occasions.  Small world eh!