Pasta perfection

Dinner parties with friends are some of the best possible fun. There's wonderful food, copious amounts of wine and hours and hours of mindless chatter and catching up with each others' lives. The most magical thing about them is that even though they happen so irregularly, when the company is right it is always as if you've hardly been apart. To make a magical dinner party even more perfect, this time we made ALL our food from scratch especially the pasta....

Cooking a fresh meal is satisfying on its own but hand making pasta was something else! I won't lie it was a long process (and due to certain guests insisting the wine be opened before we started, it certainly took even longer than planned!) but it really was so much fun! Combining flour and eggs is all there is to it, then there is lots of kneading to be done and having many hands makes that a quicker process.

Then there's the rolling.... a pasta machine makes this an easy process but again a long one! Rolling pasta however is not only great fun, involving everyone in the kitchen as each chunk of dough gets stretched out to be about 2 metres long, its a lovely thing to play with. It feels like soft leather in your hands, it is so thin in the end, but still it feels strong and almost waxy.

On our first attempt at slicing the pasta we rolled the dough up and just roughly chopped it then tried unrolling it. This wasn't so successful as it all stuck together....it also didn't produce the most beautiful pasta! It certainly looked home made!

Our more successful attempts used the tagliatelle cutter on the pasta machine and this produced such beautifully even strips of pasta that we continued to use it for the final chunks of dough. All the pasta was then hung up on the drying rack to crisp up before cooking.. a hilarious sight to see in the middle of the kitchen!

Most importantly.... the taste. Fresh pasta is amazing, I'd never had it before but it is so light, fresh and juicy I really would recommend making your own! If you don't have a pasta roller, you could easily make ravioli rolled with a rolling pin and chopped up with something tasty inside. Our beautiful pasta was served up with a lovely home made tomato sauce, goats cheese and meatballs. Simple. Delicious.