How to Make Pasta

It's still snowing here. Well, last night the clouds broke apart and the sun streamed out for a little bit, just long enough for a gorgeous sunset, finally.

But this morning it was white again!

Today I'm sharing our recipe for fresh pasta and later on in the week, I'm going to share Ryan's famous recipe for red sauce, which he invented this year. We ate this combo every other day during the first snowstorm of the winter, back in December when our lights went out. It's so yummy and so warming and so perfect for all this snow.

Making fresh noodles is one of those things that's ridiculously easy, but is time consuming enough that you have to get up your motivation to do it. A few weeks ago we invited some friends over to help though, since it's true what they say about many hands! We roughly followed Mario Batali's recipe (because, hello, Mario Batali), plus the advice of our Italian friends - who were not supervising this particular adventure! (Remember a few months ago we learned how to make casunziei, but the dough had already been made for us, by an Italian).

We made tons of pasta, using one 1 lb pound bag of flour and 5 eggs which was enough for about 6-8 people. All you need to do is pour the flour into a large bowl, and make a well in the center that you can crack the eggs into, and then whisk them together. Slowly begin to incorporate the flour into the eggs (although it tends to happen all at once, really) and then once you have a dough ball, you need to knead it! Everyone says "You'll just know when it's done", which I didn't believe, but which ended up being true. The dough becomes elastic-y and spring-y, and once that happens, you can break off chunks of it and run it through your pasta cutter!

It's so easy! And so good. (And looking at that first picture of the pasta, I'm going to say we made enough for 20 people, not 6-8).