The Cluttered Pantry

Making fresh pasta is one of those simple life things that, for me, gets lost in the pace of actual life. It doesn’t really take much effort to make, but since you have to plan ahead , the last minute grabbing of a bag of dried pasta out of the pantry is so much more likely to happen on a day to day basis.

I’ve owned a hand crank pasta maker for more than 20 years. Unfortunately, the last time I used it was when I still ran the dessert shop in New Mexico. So instead of pasta making it was used to roll out a white chocolate dough for a wedding cake order. My son Jordan was three years old then. He spent more nights asleep in a sleeping bag on the floor of the bakery while I worked than I really care to remember, but we were together, and frosting and pecan pie for breakfast clearly didn’t stunt his growth.

Now 20 years old, and a recent graduate of culinary school here in Chicago, he has, by far, outpaced my kitchen skills. This is a kid who has been making sauces since he was in fifth grade, so that really isn’t a surprise, but it is wonderful to get to stand next to him and make something as simple and as wonderful as fresh pasta doughs together. Thanks Foodbuzz.com and Visa Card for sponsoring our pasta making palooza!

Jordan brings to my kitchen the ability to make any number of complimentary sauces and in this case to make 6 different sauces to pair with the 6 doughs we made. He managed to keep all ten burners of our 1940′s Garland stove firing at the same time while jumping back and forth, from the grill on the back deck to tend the Italian sausages and grilled chicken breasts, to the double boiler on the stove where he was whisking a sabayon sauce for the vanilla pasta dough ravioli stuffed with mascarpone, ricotta and vanilla bean sauce. If nothing else, working with him reminds me that being 20 was a good age for having the energy to do such things.

We started the tasting with an appetizer of balsamic reduction over crusty french bread, with brie layered with Genoa salami rolled around a yellow teardrop tomato.

Although real life stepped in and reduced the number of our neighbors and friends who could join us, we had a wonderful night of great food, wine and conversations. We went with tasting size portions so that everyone could try a variety of different doughs and sauces:

1. Fresh Herbs pressed between thin sheets of egg pasta dough served with sun-dried tomatoes poached in rosemary infused olive oil and portobello mushrooms

2. Tomato Pasta Farfalle served on top of a pancetta tweel with peas and an heirloom tomato sauce

3. Porcini Mushroom and Parsley Pasta cut into tortelli circles served with a sauce made from grilled Italian sausages, roasted red and yellow peppers

4. Hot Red Pepper Linguine served with a marjoram and basil pesto with pecorino cheese

5. Spinach Fettucini served with a pecorino alfredo sauce and grilled chicken marinated with pine nuts, basil and pecorino

6. Vanilla bean dough filled with marscopone, ricotta and vanilla bean paste shaped into ravioli served with a sabayon sauce, fresh berries and fresh mint.

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The pasta dough recipes we used are slightly altered versions of those from a great cookbook titled: The Pasta Bible (you can still find used copies for sale) The Sauces were all Jordan. Watching him cook , I realize that he not only has learned more than I know about cooking, he has some sort of innate instinct for flavor profiles and combinations. We had a brown butter and sage sauce that went awry and burned durning the final stages of prep for serving the first tasting and instead of having a culinary melt down, he tossed the pan aside and on the fly produced a sauce from the various ingredients we already had prepped.

If you haven’t tried making your own pasta, I just can’t encourage you enough. Making the dough will take you less than ten minutes, (it’s easier than making cookies) then you toss it in the fridge to rest while you put together what ever sauce sounds good to you and when you are ready you roll out the dough or use a pasta machine to make it thin enough to be cut into the shape you like. My personal preference, and it seemed also to be that of our guests, is for a slightly thicker more bitey pasta so making it yourself gives you the chance to do that. The best part is that fresh pasta cooks in just a few minutes so you can roll out some dough, cook a small batch and taste it then choose to make more or roll it thinner if need be.

Yes, your counters will be covered with flour, and yes it would be faster to grab a bag of something dried from your pantry. But it won’t be as rich and fulfilling as home made, and at least for me, you’d miss out on the opportunity to stand next to your son and chat about the world. Even while we were banging out 6 different dishes to serve, the world seemed to slow down a bit and my senses got a chance to really take it all in. The smells of the fresh herbs we picked to press between sheets of dough, the soft silkiness of the dough from running my fingers down it while cutting small rectangles to squinch into farfalle, the amazing range of colors that you can develop by adding anything from spinach that you have blanched and wrung through a cheescloth, to tomato, roasted garlic, porcini mushrooms and most amazing of all, the deep deep dark shiny black of squid ink pasta. I loved going to produce shop and picking out the freshest herbs and veggiess knowing that really anything that was in season could become one of our dishes.

For those of you who’d like a view into the hilarity of our kitchen on a day when 6 pasta doughs and sauces were made in a house with the Wee kahunas (Jordan’s little sisters who requested mac -n- cheese of all things for dinner!) Here is a little fun video that Mark made throughout the day.

I won’t take you through the step by step of making the dough, there is a really great tutorial on Rouxbe.com that has video steps that you can follow easily.

I will say that every cook book and lesson shows a pile of flour on a cutting board with a well in the center for the eggs and other liquids, and yes that works fine, but if you have a large bowl you can do the same thing inside it, and keep the whole process a bit more self contained.

The recipes for each dough can be found below in the comments section, we also made a saffron dough that produced a beautiful yellow color with a sweet and slightly spicy scent, but chose to save it for the next day’s meal. We’ll be posting recipes for sauces Jordan put together, later this week. And, as soon as I can find a source for more squid ink, I’ll post photos and a recipe of the saffron pasta and the squid ink pasta dishes as well.

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