Adventures in Pinteresting: Homemade Spinach Pasta

I have recently discovered the deliciousness that is the homemade pasta noodle. I found a basic noodle recipe and have made it several times now. It's been kid approved. It consists of....wait for it.... TWO ingredients. Flour and eggs. Do you have those two items in your kitchen? Then yummy homemade pasta is just a few steps away. While this blog post is actually about spinach pasta, all you need for basic pasta is two cups of flour (most recipes I've seen call for special flours, but I just used all purpose) and one egg. This will make enough pasta for about 2-3 people. Then, follow the steps below, omitting the spinach steps.

I set out to make regular pasta last night and at the last second remembered that I had some spinach in the fridge that needed to be used sooner rather than later. After a quick check through Pinterest, I found a recipe that closely matched the one I normally used, meshed the new recipe with the one that worked for me in the past, and began preparing the dough. I was worried when I got to the kneading portion because the dough was so tough and hard to knead. I ended up having to use my rolling pin to give my kneading a little extra OOMPH. I continued on with my endeavor, but was prepared to just chalk this up to a loss and run out for fast food if it didn't turn out well. My perseverance paid off though and it turned out wonderfully! Now, without further ado.... the step by step instructions!

Spinach Pasta

Ingredients- olive oil, garlic (optional), 1/2 lb. spinach, 4 cups flour, 2-3 eggs

Step 1- Over medium heat, add a couple turns of olive oil and garlic, if you like, to a skillet.

Step 2- Add spinach, cover with a lid, and cook for about 5 minutes. Stir occasionally.

Step 3- Remove spinach from heat. Once spinach is cool enough to handle, squeeze all the liquid out of the leaves. Once I squeezed out the liquid by hand, I then put the spinach into several paper towels and squeezed it some more. Get all that liquid out!

A dry lump of spinach!

Step 4- Finely chop the spinach.
Optional step- if you have a mortar and pestle, put spinach in after chopping and ground into a paste. I only did this step because I actually have a mortar and pestle that I haven't used in several years.

Step 5- In a small bowl, crack two eggs and add spinach, mixing well.

Step 6- Measure out 4 cups of flour and put onto a clean surface, creating a well for the spinach and egg mixture (or just the egg mixture if you are making the basic pasta).

Step 7- Mix your dough well. At this point, my dough really wasn't coming together well, so I added another egg. Once I worked that in, the dough still wasn't sticking well, so I started adding small bits of water. Knead your dough for about 8-10 minutes until it isn't tacky. Like I said before, the dough got really tough. I ended up dividing the dough in half to make it a bit more manageable. Cover with plastic wrap and let the dough rest at room temperature from 15 minutes up to 2 hours. I usually go for 30 minutes.

Step 8- Roll your dough and cut your noodles. If you don't have a pasta roller and cutter set, then just use a rolling pin and a knife. It's that simple. My hubby bought me an attachment set for my Kitchen Aid mixer a long time ago, which I hardly used until recently. I love it and it's so much fun to use!!! Either way, I ended up dividing each ball of dough into 3 parts. When you roll the dough out, it spreads A LOT!

If using a pasta roller, I usually run the dough through the first setting 3-4 times. After it passes through, I add a bit of flour if the dough is sticky, then fold it in half, and run it through the first setting again. Then I run it through settings 2-4 one time each. Usually I stop here if making fettucini noodles.

Run the sheets of dough through your pasta cutter. Peanut was intriguied by this!

To keep the cut noodles out of the way while cutting all the dough, I hung them over clothes hangers covered with wax paper. I did take some of the noodles and made small, single serving nests and put those into the freezer for future use. The hanger on the far right I separated out to try air drying those. Once throughly dry (overnight), I broke the noodles in half and put into a Ziploc bag. The freezing and the drying are experiments for me. I usually only make just enough for us to eat. From what I read, freezing is better and it hardly adds any time to the cooking time.

Cooking instructions- Add pasta noodles to a pan of heavily boiling, salted water. Don't skip the salt because it adds more flavor to the noodles, especially since none was added to the dough. From what I've read, the water should taste like the ocean. Boil the pasta for about 3 minutes. That's it!!! It cooks super fast. Serve it up however you like and enjoy!