aka R’acquel

Cooking is one of the focus areas in my homeschooling ‘program’ for Aidan becuse it’s one of those important skills you need to acquire for learning how to live independantly as an adult. We’re working together on a recipe book by taking photos & documenting the process of making food.

I picked up the skill of making pasta many moons ago before-child, during the days i had the luxury of time to indulge my serious hobby for cooking. So anywayz ~ PASTA. We don’t each much pasta these days, it’s pretty much out of our day to day diet but i figured that pasta-making would be a fantastic recipe to indulge because it’s so dead easy to make. I also find that home-made pasta tastes much better compared to the commercial stuff as well - it feels much better on the digestive system.

The ingredients, are dead simple. All you need is some eggs & flour - that’s it. As it’s been quite some time since i last made pasta, it panned out i needed an extra egg.

Ingredients
2 cups flour
3 eggs

Crack the eggs into a bowl ~ it’s great for fine-motor skill practise for the kids - so is peeling boiled eggs as well.

Next ~ dump the flour into the bowl, not too hard!

Then basically ~ you have to mash it all up with your hands and form it into a dough. Aidan found this challenging because it recquires strength in the fingers but he also has sensory issues with sticky-things ending up on his fingers too. It wasn’t overtly distressing for him, but he was getting frustrated because he couldn’t form a dough. Not a problem for mum to take over while he washed the gunk off his hands because there’s no way he was going to say “no” to the “pasta mill” - as he was *really* looking forward to using that one!

So finally, the flour has been moulded into a dough and it’s ready to get passed through the pasta mill on a clean table. If you don’t have a mill, you can simply use a rolling pin to flatten it out and cut into strips with a knife.

You need to pass the dough through the mill a number of times before the pasta sheets become nice & even, slowly progressing to a smaller dial on the machine to create sheets which are thinner. It helps to lightly coat each side with a bit of flour to prevent it from sticking. We made about 4 long sheets in total. It’s amazing how looooong the sheets can become.

Picture of the final product hanging on the clothes horse to dry. If you have nothing to hang it on, you can use a broom or a dowel suspended in the kitchen somehow.

You can create alternatives to this recipe by incorporating things like mashed spinach to make ‘green pasta’ ~ but you need to be really careful because the excess “water” will make the dough too “loose” without enough “glue” - important to squeeze as much water out of such ingredients as you can.

The beauty of fresh pasta ~ it doesn’t take long to cook ..and we enjoyed eating “Makaka with Paprika Sprinkles” for dinner that night …which is Aidan’s name for this Turkish dish.

I was so surprised by just how good the pasta tasted, that i look forward to attempting some stuffed raviolli with Aidan for the next round.