Tonight when I got home from work, I threw the mail on the couch, washed my hands, and made my favorite supper: buttered popcorn, washed down with a glass of Atkins sangria (red wine w/diet orange soda). After I wiped the grease off my fingers, I picked up my new book, Heat by Bill Buford. Buford is a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, where he was fiction editor for eight years. The subtitle of his book is “An amateur’s adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany.” My bookmark was now stuck at the chapter “Pasta Maker.” I loved reading about Buford’s adventures working in various restaurants, most particularly Babbo in NYC. I worked in a restaurant in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, for half a year once, and it was a great if exhausting experience. As I got into the chapter, I continued playing with the idea of making my own pasta, which had occurred to me the day before yesterday while reading about Buford’s initial experiences at the pasta station in Babbo.
How nuts! I don’t eat pasta these days, and a couple of years ago, somebody left a pasta machine on the basement give-away table in our condo building. I picked it up and kept it for a while, then gave it away myself without ever using it. In DC I can buy perfectly fine imported Italian pasta if I want for less than $1 a package at Litteri’s in the DC Farmers Market across 6th St. NE from Gallaudet. But I don’t want. I’ve been following a modified Atkins diet for a few months and have lost 26 pounds. Pasta is not one of the approved choices.
Anyway, the simplicity of the recipe (1 cup of flour, 1 egg) appealed to me, and I CAN have one serving of whole grain a day. An Atkins dieter can eat something made from whole wheat, I guess, like a slice of whole-wheat bread, although usually I have stone-ground oatmeal (or popcorn!). But my brain was ticking over, so yesterday I bought a small package of semolina flour and one of stone-ground whole wheat flour at Whole Foods…. just in case I wanted to make pasta.
Ha. I got up off the couch, went into the kitchen, put a big pot of water on to boil, and started cleaned up the cutting board next to the sink. Then I heaped half a cup of semolina (like very fine cornmeal) and half a cup of whole wheat flour into a big soup plate, added a good pinch of sea salt, and broke in two eggs. I stirred this around with a fork till all the flour was dampened, and then I started kneading the dough. I kneaded for a good 10 or 15 minutes, enjoying the way the dough loses its stickiness and becomes firm, smooth, and elastic. I stopped to sniff it, too, on the off chance that it might smell different once it got going. Then I got out my good maple rolling pin—the kind that looks like a stick, not the kind with handles and ball bearings—and started to roll out the dough. So far, so good.
The woman who first allows Buford to observe her making pasta in her restaurant in the mountains of northern Italy, then lets him try his own hand, tells him to roll the pasta so thin he can see the wood of the table through the dough. My dough soon stretched out to cover the cutting board completely. It wasn’t nearly thin enough, but I was out of space, so I figured what the heck? It looked pretty thin to me. I rolled it into a long tube and sliced off thin strips that, in theory at least, I could unwind into flat noodles.
Alas, the strips stuck together, and I wound up chopping the gummy disks into bits and pulling them apart. The results looked like nothing so much as night crawlers. By this time, the water was boiling, so I scooped up a nice double handful of noodles and dropped them in. The noodles felt very soft and light, and I was pretty excited, wondering what they would taste like when they were done. Somewhere in the book (or was it online), it says that fresh pasta floats when it’s cooked. My noodles popped up to the surface almost at once, but I didn’t think they were done, so I left them to boil while I made a sauce.
I got a sauté pan out and melted maybe a tablespoon of butter and added a splash of olive oil, too. There was a nice, fresh zucchini in the fridge, so I chopped about a fourth of it into very thin slices. Next I took a slice of yellow onion and chopped that fine, then dumped all the vegetables into the hot butter, seasoned it with salt and pepper, covered the pan, and checked on the noodles. They’d all sunk to the bottom of the pan. I fished one out of the pot and tasted it. It was cooked but very bland.
The pot has an insert for cooking pasta, so I lifted it up, draining the noodles as I did. I dumped them all into the sauté pan, added another tablespoon of butter, more salt and pepper, and a ladle full of the pasta water. When it looked nice and bubbly, I slid it all into a pasta bowl, added about 5 spoons of Parmesan cheese (which disappeared into the hot sauce!), and started eating.
It was not perfect, but it was very good and satisfying…. I could eat a dish of homemade pasta and vegetables every night and not need a scrap of meat.
After I ate, I went back into the kitchen to clean up the remaining pasta dough. I was just going to throw it out, but it seemed like a waste, so I decided to roll it out again, slice it into thin strips, and dry them overnight (or at least until bedtime). The more I sliced and draped, the more tired I got. Finally I started pinching off bits and making them into twisty things.
By the time I was done with the main piece of dough, I just chopped the scraps into little bits. Perhaps this is how all those tiny pasta shapes evolved—a tired housewife in her kitchen saying "hell with it" and chopping it all into tiny chunks.
clipped from casaoliver.com
