Homemade Pasta

Our 10 year old son has asked me for months to make homemade pasta. With the recent holidays, we were a little busy for a big project. The last time I made pasta was before our children were born. Last week we watched Masterchef Junior together. The young contestants, ages 8 to 13, made pasta and of course our son wanted to know when we were making it. So, we picked last Sunday to make pasta! Then he said we should make homemade bread. And I decided we should make homemade sauce because you just can’t use jarred sauce with homemade pasta!

First, we made the bread. I chose a Basic Italian Bread recipe I found on foodnetwork.com. My son did all the measuring and most of the kneading, and he scored the lines on the bread.

While the bread was in the oven, he chopped the vegetables for the sauce, sauteed and simmered. I chose a Giada recipe for Simple Tomato Sauce.

Our son wanted to make cheese ravioli. I found Ricotta-Filled Ravioli on Epicurious. It called for 1 cup of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano – which our son grated.

I found a pasta recipe online that I thought was from Jamie Oliver. We measured everything correctly but as soon as I touched the dough, I knew it wasn’t right. It was heavy like a brick and too crumbly. Our son had worked hard cracking and separating eggs, and measuring ingredients. And I had a hard time deciding to throw away 10 eggs and 5 cups of flour. We were disappointed but I told him it would be worth are time to start over. I looked at the recipe closer and realized that it wasn’t really from a Jamie Oliver site. So, I went to my reliable Better Homes and Gardens cook book for a simple pasta recipe. It came out perfect – soft, elastic and beautiful!

While we were waiting for the pasta dough to rest, he set the table with a white tablecloth, and cloth napkins, and lit the candles.

We create a little pasta assembly line. We took turns rolling out the pasta and cutting it, and dolloping the cheese, folding over the pasta and pressing the edges.

We plated ravioli with a drizzle of olive oil and our tomato sauce, fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano, and a fresh basil leaf.

 The fresh pasta was so yummy! I especially liked the two cheese filling. The sauce was so fresh tasting. The bread was amazing – crusty on the outside and cloudy soft on the inside.

During dinner I asked my little man if he knew how long we were in the kitchen. He was surprised to learn it had been five hours since we started our project. I asked him if it was worth it. He said “YES!”

 It was worth it for me too. I love being with him. I love teaching him. I love his enthusiasm and lack of intimidation in the kitchen. I love getting lost in time with him. It was definitely one of those moments in time that I wanted to bottled up and save forever.

A huge thank you to Michael for taking these photos.