Making Homemade Pasta ~ Recipe

It's been a while since I've made some delicious homemade pasta noodles but lately a few of my bloggy friends have been making them and well you know the old saying... monkey see, monkey do! *grin*.



Plus I don't want one bit of the broccoli we picked from the garden yesterday to go to waste. So I thought I'd be adventurous and make some gloriously green fettucine noodles using our fresh broccoli as the colorant :)



I started by steaming just under 3/4 of a pound of broccoli. I weighed it on my kitchen scale and it was 11 ounces before it went into the steamer. As soon as it was just tender I removed it from the heat and let it cool completely before moving on to the next step of pureeing it along with 1 egg and 1 tablespoon of dried basil in my blender until it was nice and smooth.

To finish your pasta dough you will need:

2 eggs
3 cups of flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon lukewarm water

Place your flour and salt in a large bowl or directly on your counter and make a nice big well in the center. In the well add your eggs, oil, water and broccoli puree.

With a fork slowly start to beat your eggs, mixing them into your broccoli puree and then start to gradually pull the surrounding flour into your wet ingredients until it has taken on a dough like consistency and you can start to work it with your hands.



This is probably the only part of making homemade noodles that really requires any elbow grease *grin*. Keep working your dough kneading in a little bit of flour at a time until you have a smooth and silky feeling dough. It took me about 10 minutes and around a 1/4 cup of extra flour to get my dough to a gorgeous soft green stage. Once you've finished kneading cover your dough with a greased bowl and let it rest for 20 minutes.

While your dough is resting you can bring out your pasta machine and clamp it to your counter so you are ready to start rolling :) Don't worry if you don't have a pasta machine. You can roll the dough by hand with your rolling pin and use your pizza cutter to make strips to!



This is my favorite part. I just love to see the dough work through the rollers into long sheets :) It helps to have a second set of hands but definitely not mandatory.

Cut off a chunk of dough a little bigger than a golf ball but not as big as a tennis ball. Does that work for mental imagery? *grin*. Dust your chunk of dough with flour so that it won't stick to the rollers and with your machine set to the widest width start cranking your dough through. Repeat this step 2 or 3 times at that width dusting with flour as necessary and then reduce the roller width one setting. Carry on rolling and dusting as necessary until you have a nice thin sheet of dough roughly 3 mm thick.



Next switch your handle to the noodle cutting rollers and feed your sheet of dough through the fettucine roller from start to finish. That's it! You now have a handful of fresh fettucine noodles to dry!



I don't have a fancy place to hang my fresh noodles so I use the railing of our stairs covered with tea towels that have been dusted with flour so the noodles won't stick as they dry. Let them dry completely if you want to store them or if you plan to eat them for dinner right away let them hang there about 15 minutes before cooking them. They cook up really quickly! I usually boil them 5-6 minutes but if you like yours a little more al dente I'd cut the cooking time by a couple of minutes :)

Everyone just raved over our noodles so I can't wait to make them again! If you have fussy eaters this is a fabulous way to get them to eat their broccoli without even knowing it as the noodle doesn't actually taste like broccoli at all. It just gives it the lovely green color and the basil that I added gave the noodles a deliciously sweet basil taste. Mmmm so good *grin*.

It makes roughly 1 pound of pasta and it was the perfect amount for all 6 of us with our garlic toast :)

Bon appetit!

~ Rosina

Garden Update

We are finally seeing some rewards from all of the gardening we have been doing :)

Our broccoli has just exploded this last week with the few days of hot weather we finally got and of course the whole lot of them just happens to be ready at the same time *grin*.

So we've cut all of the larger crowns off and left the side shoots on so that they can grow and provide us with many more harvests throughout the summer.

My peas are not doing to bad but still no flowers. I hope that they will perk up!

It's actually not un-seasonally cool here this June but my beans are definitely not liking all of the wind and rain :) Can you believe that most days we are still running around in our heavy winter coats?!

I'm very excited about my leeks! They are doing really well after being transplanted and I can't wait till they grow big enough to try a few :)

My tomatoes are doing fantastic in their hanging planter bags!! This one is my 'Window Box Roma' and it is covered in lots of little baby romas.

Here's another one of my hanging tomatoes, this one is 'Rocket' and it to is just loaded with little tomatoes :) So far my cabbage isn't forming any heads yet and I'm really not sure what happened to my beets and carrots but it looks like I'm going to have to do some replaning :( The birds have been particularly bad this year eating all the seeds and green shoots so most have been lost. Oh well, I must look on the bright side and be very happy with what is coming *grin*.

How does your garden grow? I'd love to know *grin*.

~ Rosina

Veggie Planting ~ Outdoor Challenge Day 13

Boy are we lucky!! The rain managed to hold off and it was just a gloomy day but it gave us a chance to get our cold tolerant vegetables planted :)

Before we could get started we needed to head over to the manure pile and load up. I think that wheelbarrow rides are M's new favorite mode of transportation *grin*.

Look at all that wonderful horse manure. Super food for growing great vegetables!

You know you've got some pretty healthy soil if there are lots of earthworms wriggling around when you start digging and we found quite a few of them :) We usually plant flowers in this bed but thought that we would maximize our vegetable space and fill it up with things we could eat! LOL.

As K dug holes for our broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage I filled up a gallon sized pot full of manure and then M & L would dump it into an empty hole. We had quite the efficient assembly line of digging and dumping going on!

Broccoli and cauliflower love lime so each hole got a big scoop of lime that was mixed in with the manure before the plant was set on top of it.

Oh boy are these going to taste good when they're big enough to eat *grin*.

Do you have photos of your children enjoying the outdoors? Visit The Great Outdoors Challenge to join in the fun and you can also visit other participants and see what sort of nature fun they have been having by clicking on the names below :)

~ Rosina

Fellow Nature Players:lisa, sanders, angelina, phyllis, sarah, christie, jennifer, debbie, dong dong, denise, luisa, joy, stephanie, cori, alex, dawn, kristen, catherine, tricia, becky, christy, ruth, kari, courtney, branflakes, jessica, renee, haiku, brynn, amy, clemencia, sherry, leslie, lise, renee, anet, jenn, marina, amy, ella, marcia, karen, beth, julie, kyndale, kelly, lizzie, eileen, ag, mari-ann, cindy, robin, nicole, debbie, julia, anita, lisa, jenn, montessori, marita, jeannie, hallie, mandy, kangaroo, andrea, joey, carmen, teena, stephinie, gidget, elizabeth, emma, rosina, saminda, melissa, katie, becca, atouria, barbara, ariella, missy, elizabeth, sarah, eileen, lisa, stacy, jennifer, tulsileaf, lisa C, morticia, angela, rana, jamie, lisa c, luz, charley, heather, valerie, kirsten, rachel, annie, kendra, beth s, lindsey, michelle, megan, renee

Garden Fever

It has finally warmed up enough here to start planting the garden, hooray!! It's hard to believe that we have only been snow free for 3 weeks but the bitter cold frosty mornings are still hanging on :) My oldest two are really into the garden this year and want to help out with ever aspect which is wonderful. I hope the enthusiasm holds out through the weeding season! LOL.



When we were down island last week I cheated a bit and picked up some veggie starter packs to plant along with our seedlings to give us a bit of an earlier harvest on some of the veggies. The kids picked out cabbage, broccoli, artichokes, lettuce and some sweet peas to grow up the garden fence.



Teamwork, you gotta love it! One to scoop the horse manure into the holes and another to plunk in the plants :)

And what would a day of digging in the dirt be without worms! Thank goodness there was no taste testing. Well there may have been a little dirt munching at one point, but definitely no worms made it into my 3 year olds mouth :) Now we just have to keep the slugs at bay until we can plant our warmer crops after May 24th. The danger of any frost will have passed by then and I am so looking forward to beans.

~ Rosina