Kitchen Sort-of-Fail to Wonderful Dinner!

Missy Tippens

Well, I did it. I used my new KitchenAid to make fresh, homemade pasta! I thought I'd share my mostly success story. :)

First, when I made my first batch of dough, it turned silvery black! After a quick google search, my son found lots of reviews that mentioned that the bowls (which had been polished at the factory) needed to be cleaned beyond a soap and water wash. I tried the baking soda trick. Tried the olive oil trick. And was still getting silver on a paper towel. So I gave up, threw out the bad dough and started fresh. This time, I mixed the dough on the cutting board by hand. (I did finally use lemon juice and salt later and got my bowl useable for the future.)

The biggest failure came in forgetting to divide the dough. When I took the pasta making class, I clearly wrote in my notes: take an egg sized piece and start rolling it.

When the day arrived to use my machine several weeks after that class, I missed that little part of my notes. I started running my whole 3-egg batch of dough through the machine.

And I ended up with a pasta sheet about a mile long! LOL As I called my daughter to help support it, I suddenly remembered dividing the dough before. SOOO.... I chopped it in half and started rolling again. :)

By the time I got to this point, everyone was starving. So I ditched making my fancy recipe for cannelloni. I cut the pasta sheets into spaghetti noodles and set them out to dry. (I did not have a pasta dryer yet so had to scatter them around my counter.)

While they dried, I sautéed some sweet onion, then added in a bag of frozen spinach that I had already thawed for the cannelloni recipe. Once heated, I added a jar of store-bought spaghetti sauce.

Once the sauce was ready, I cooked the noodles for about a minute (until they started floating).

We served topped with parmesan. It turned out SO GOOD! I just love homemade noodles. And I love being able to punt and switch gears in the middle of a dinner party. :) Thankfully, no one cared. Of course, I think they were just so hungry by that point, they were thankful for any food. Hey! Maybe that's the trick to entertaining. Ha!

P.S. My kitchen was a huge mess by the time I finished this whole process. Flour and bits of noodles all over the counter and floor. But that's the beauty of having young adult children at home for the holiday weekend (young adults who really, really enjoyed the pasta and felt grateful at the end of the meal). They know exactly how to jump in and help. :)



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