Jottings from my African Kitchen Table: Pasta Mama!!

Pasta is one of my favourite things to eat. it can be very easy - just cheese or bottles sauce, or as fancy as you can make it with lots of cream and seafood or made into intricate ravioli shapes.

I have owned a pasta machine for years and.....this weeks' confession is -

I have never actually used it for making pasta until very recently. (they are very useful for rolling out fondant icing)

My friend Anna and I had been trying to make a pasta making date for months. We had several other friends who wanted to join us but there was never a date to suit all. In the end we finally made a date and just hoped others could come.
So come the day we are 4 and 4 children on a Sunday morning, gathered in Anna's kitchen. Two pasta machines to hand with bags of flour and a basket of eggs, a couple of beetroot and some spinach for colour.

100gms of flour to one egg yolk is all you need. Very simple in theory.
The flour is in mounds on the bench in front of each of us and we carefully seperate our eggs and plop the yolks in the middle of the flour. This is where the fun began. Trying to keep everyone 'light of fingers' as they bring the flour into the eggs is not easy and I have visions of my old home economics teacher getting very frustrated when I was making scones at the age of about 14. Eventually we have balls of dough which are starting to look and feel as silky as the photographs. We then try and put the colour into it. This takes alot of work and some of it does look a bit streaky (especially the green) but who cares, we all agree it is ours and we can make it how we like!

Then the machines come into use. This is the really fun bit - rolling, rolling and folding and rolling again - except my machine does not seem to want to play the game, one of the rollers is not moving. In the end we use one machine for the rolling and the other just for cutting into strips.
Soon we have lovely little 'nests' lined up on the bench and we are acting like new mothers looking at their first child, we are so proud of our achievment.
The children have all had a turn at helping with the rolling and cutting and are keen to start eating.
Anna has started to make the sauces. Nothing too fancy, we want our creations to be the star attraction.
There is an enormous pot of boiling water and the pasta nests are dropped in one by one for a few minutes. 'Oh dear' they are coming out rather paler than they went in especially the beetroot pink, vegetable colours are not water fast!

As we all start eating there is silence until the first 'yum' escapes from a full mouth.
There is plenty for everyone to take home. We all agree that it has been a well spent Sunday morning.

Yesterday Helen and I were discussing what we should try next. I have recently purchased a macaron kit.. I always buy then at the airport when coming out of Paris and figure they should not be so difficult. Helen is keen but suggests we should have another pasta class to refine our skills a bit. Maybe we will do ravioli. everyone is just returning from the long holidays for the start of the new school year so it will be a great excuse to catch up on the past few months.

My pasta machine has been relegated to the scrap metal box in the shed. Jim tried to fix it so it ended up in bits. He did find the problem but could not mend it properly. Oh well, maybe next time I should spend a bit more than $10 at Aldi's bargain table.