Pasta-a-GoGo

It is that time again, time to step into the world of culinary delight.

I have always loved science and my time with Daring Kitchen has been all about experimentation and creativity.  This month the challenge was pasta!  I love pasta.  I mean, is there really anyone who doesn't love pasta?  I have made pasta before and it was well worth the work, but this time I was determined to walk blindly into the abyss and see what I could stumble on that would be unique and interesting.  As you can see by the above photo, I found my unique and interesting is probably an understatement.

So, pasta.

I had to do a little research for this one and I learned about protein and how it is essential to making good pasta.  I also discovered various flours that you can use to make pasta and that sometimes it is better to combine flours to get the perfect dough.  I decided to use bread flour and semolina flour.  Doughs I made with just the bread flour were not as elastic as you might want pasta to be.  When I hung them up to dry, they would stretch until they broke and I would find them in a small pile under my drying rod.  By the way, my drying rod is nothing more than a $2 spring curtain rod that I put between my kitchen cabinets.  I love a deal! My son loved helping out by cranking the handle of the pasta machine and I appreciated having a sous chef, no matter how short he was.

The first successful dough was one that I added beets to.  It had this pretty light red color and smelled really good, kind of earthy .  When I cooked the beet pasta the color almost completely disappeared and it became a very pale pink color.  I was a little disappointed that it faded so much but it tasted really great so I let it go.

In the next dough I added fresh herbs from our kitchen garden; oregano, basil and garlic chives.  The pasta turned out to be a beautiful yellow-green color and it really stood out in the bowl.  The herbiness was so good with the plum tomato marinara that was used on it.  It literally seasoned the sauce with every bite.

I mixed the beet and herb pasta together and it was so perfect with Parmesan and some fresh basil on top.  My son ate 2 big bowls of it before he started to beg for "the crazy dessert".

My super experimental pasta was my dessert pasta.  I thought it out logically and figured that I had to add a sweetener to it so that it wouldn't just be a regular pasta with some fruit in it.  I made the dough but left out the semolina and added in a little bit of powdered sugar.  The dough was too soft to be sent through my pasta machine so I kneaded in some of the semolina and it immediately started to get more elastic.  I rolled it out flat and ran it through the wide noodle cutter.  I was afraid that the thin noodles would cause it to stick and bind up the machine.  I covered the noodles in powdered sugar and let them dry for a while.  They didn't dry stiff like the other pastas but did eventually dry enough that they didn't stick together and they cooked up just like the other noodles.  Now I had cooked homemade sweet fruit pasta and I did what any self-respecting person making up a freakish pasta dessert would do......

I made hot fudge and whipped cream  to go on top, splashed a little maraschino juice over it and added a fresh strawberry on top.  I am calling it a Mint Cran-Cherry Fruit Pasta Sundae.

 So here is the critique of this weird concoction:  First off, my 6 year old said that he could eat 30 gallons of it.  I think that says a lot coming from a kid who won't eat corn if he thinks he sees a speck of something that might be pepper in it.  My husband, who often can only muster up "It's good" said "I think you've got something here!  This is really good!"  I have come a long way, from good to really good.

My thoughts on it were this, I loved that it was sweet but not too sweet and the pasta added a really pleasing bite to it.  I mixed mine up so that the whipped cream, fudge and cherry juice all became a sauce for the pasta and noticed that it stuck to the pasta just like any Alfredo or marinara.  I really liked it!  The tiny bit of sweetness in the pasta was perfect and made it very clear that this was a dessert and not some weird misunderstanding between the cook and their "should be" savory food.  I have some other ideas with regards to adding a little spice to the pasta too, maybe cinnamon or nutmeg.  I will definitely make this again!  A friend told me to start a restaurant that sold only pasta for breakfast, lunch and dinner with little twists on each course of pasta.  What about a breakfast pasta with potato, bacon and, of course, egg.  For lunch a peanut butter and jelly pasta, maybe a hot pepper pasta for dinner and then the dessert pasta.  I have come away from this challenge with a ton of new ideas about what noodles can be.

I improvised the dessert pasta but I have put together what I think I did, you will probably have to tweak it a little bit.  You can view and print the recipes for all of the dishes below.

Homemade pasta dough with add-ins

Plum Tomato Marinara Sauce

Mint Cran-Cherry Fruit Pasta Sundae

Thanks Stephfood and Daring Kitchen for another fantastic challenge!

Steph from Stephfood was our Daring Cooks' July hostess.  Steph challenged us to make homemade noodles without the help of a motorized pasta machine.  She provided us with recipes for Spätzle and Fresh Egg Pasta as well as a few delicious sauces to pair our noodles with!


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