Pasta Nests

Winter brings a different style of cooking. We use frozen and preserved fruits and vegetables to make casseroles and pastas, replacing the lighter fare from the summer garden. Because it is cooler, it is also more pleasant to spend time in a warm kitchen. We have been baking a lot of breads and desserts, and today we made fresh pasta. It is a good way to use eggs, and the noodles are tasty.

It is a little bit of a process. The first step is making the dough, which then chills in the refrigerator. The dough then gets divided, rolled into sheets, and then cut into noodles. We use a pasta-making attachment for our 30-year old KitchenAid stand mixer, which makes quick work of things. I need more practice, but one tip I can offer is to create all the pasta sheets, and lay them out on a cotton tea towel to dry a little for about 30 minutes. I divide the dough into four balls, and run each through the pasta roller. I then cut each sheet in half crossways, lay them on a tea towel, and dust them with a little semolina, giving me eight sheets. The hardest part is keeping the cats off the towels.

Once the sheets dry a little, I then run each sheet through the cutter. I find that the noodles separate better and stick together less when the sheets are a little dry. The eight sheets give me eight nests of pasta, and each is about right for a one-person serving. I place each nest on a sheet pan with parchment paper, and then into the freezer. Once frozen, we could transfer the nests to zip-lock bags, but the pasta never lasts long enough to store long-term. We just peel a nest from the parchment paper, drop into a pot of boiling water, and add to a skillet of warm sauce. Perfect for a cold winter day.