Making Whole Wheat Spinach Pasta

This weekend we made pasta making a family affair.  A few weeks ago Andrew made a batch for dinner. It was our first experience with homemade pasta and we are all convinced there is no going back to the store bought option (except, of course if we don’t have time to make anything else). We decided to try and make a quadruple batch, dry, and freeze the noodles for a delicious quick dinner.

Oh my goodness it was a disaster at first.  I was so frustrated trying to get the pasta maker to work and figure it out with Emily and Andrew.  Eventually we got into a groove and things turned around. We had a marvelous time.  We followed this recipe for Whole Wheat Spinach Pasta and topped it with Oven Roasted Tomato sauce. Emily turned the handle for the pasta machine the entire time and really got the hang of it.  She also dug out the dough that got stuck and made a nice pile. When we had finished with all the dough she then rolled out the extras and fed it through the machine all by herself.

A few tips:

Cut the dough into tennis sized balls. Roll it out with tons of flour, applying every few rolls.

Create a long strip that is 4-5 inches wide.  We cut our long, thin strips into 9-10 inch long sections and fed it through the pasta machine to make noodles.  Andrew also had success cutting it into noodle sized strips with a pizza cutter but use a ton of flour so they don’t get stuck to the counter.

Dry the cut noodles on cooling racks.

Make a lot.  It is a family favorite and goes very quickly.