Pasta — Going green

Spinach pasta. Yummy and easy to make.

In my house, quantities of egg pasta are measured by the egg, as in "how many eggs of pasta should I make?" I also roll out my pasta a half egg at a time. What is an egg of pasta? For me, it's the quantity of egg pasta made with one egg. Although I haven't been putting recipes into this blog, here is my recipe for egg pasta:

Egg pasta
2 eggs
200 grams of flour

For 2 eggs of pasta, I usually just do it on the board or in a bowl, since I don't want to mess up the food processor for a trivial amount of pasta. Four eggs? Food processor. Throw the flour into the bowl of the food processor. Add the eggs one at a time, until they are thoroughly mixed. Pulse the last one, and the mixture will form into a ball (or a bunch of big clumps.

Let the dough hydrate for about 10 minutes, then knead until it is smooth. Let the dough rest about 15 minutes, then roll and cut.  

While I do increment pasta up by the egg, I typically never make less than 1 egg's worth of pasta. And, conversely, I usually top off at 4 eggs. It gets tough to knead after that. Large eggs weigh about 50 grams each, so 2 eggs of pasta is about 300 grams (call it 10 ounces, a nice amount to make for 2 people).

Ready to roll out

I don't make pasta nearly as often as I ought to, though I did suddenly decide that I wanted some egg pasta last week. It was delicious. Now we had a small amount of leftover spinach and the direction to go in was obvious. It would even spur us to a meatless dinner (we've been eating an awful lot of Julia Child-inspired hunks of meat).

Also, unlike making Julia Child-inspired hunks of meat, this is pretty easy. Reading through that, I feel guilty for not making it all the time. I'll get over it.

In any case, spinach pasta is no more difficult than making regular egg pasta. I wilted two cups of spinach (one cup for every two eggs), then let it drain and cool. Once it was cool, I squeezed out even more moisture, then chopped the spinach.

The finished pasta

My habit is to make the pasta and then incorporate the chopped spinach. Really, I should be mixing spinach with the eggs and then getting the flour into that. I think the next time I make this, I'll reverse the sequence, going spinach, eggs, flour (so, stay posted).

Once the resulting dough has been kneaded, rolled out, and cut, it's light green with some flecks of darker green. After a while, or after cooking, the pasta is pretty uniform. And attractive. And tasty.

We tossed it with onions and tomatoes, so it was a healthy dinner too.

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