We Made Homemade Pasta

I don't know about you, but I have a love for carbohydrates. I am pretty sure they don't have the same love for me, but for me it is all about the carbohydrates. Well, it moderation, but still they are oh so good and believe it or not this recipe was actually relatively health.

For my hubby's b-day he wanted Pasta-Extruder Attachment for our kitchen aid.  Luckily for him it when on sale right before his b-day, and we were able to get it for him. Of course he had to order it for himself and have it shipped to his work. Which means, no surprised happy face of unwrapping the gift. However, there were lots of happy faces, during the pasta making process.

We decided to make the light wheat pasta from the KitchenAid recipe book that came with the  Attachment, which is why the pasta is brownish instead of the normal cream color of pasta.

We used the ginormous pasta board that my mother-in-law had made for us.

She also got a new one for herself and two more for her other kids. It was such a nice gift. I have used it a few times for bread making, but this is the first time for pasta.

After the pasta was done mixing in the KitchenAid, my hubby did the kneading.

We found it was a little hard to make it come together in one ball as the recipe said. Also, pasta dough is really dry and crumbly. (Did not know that!)

The next step is to make little pasta balls to stick in the extruder. Some of ours were a little to big, but we just made the smaller and went with it.

Then you put the pasta in, and wait while it does its thing.

You also use the little pusher tool to make sure it all goes down the tube. Then put more dough in and wait some more.

Ok fine you do have to cut the pasta off when it gets to the right size but it is a lot of waiting to get 1 lbs of pasta.

Of course, now, you have to cook it.

It cooks up super quick.

And that little bowl of pasta turns into this giant platter of pasta. I should have taken a picture to show the different sizes of the bowls, but this bowl is the big huge pasta serving bowl.

We decided to go really light with our sauce. We just did Trader Joe's pesto, some heirloom tomatoes and  fresh mozzarella balls. It was really good and just the right amount of everything. Plus for wheat pasta it wasn't bad at all.

Recipe: Pesto Caprese with Homemade Pasta

Ingredients

•  3/4 cup Pesto (homemade or store bought) 
• 6-10 small heirloom tomatoes 
• fresh bocconcini (bite sized) mozzarella
• 1 lbs pasta with ridges (we choose rigatoni) 
• white flour
• wheat flour 
• water 
• and eggs 

Preparation instructions:

Make the pasta. Use your favorite recipe (I don't feel comfortable sharing the recipe out of the book since I didn't alter it at all) or use store bought. Place cooked pasta in a large bowl. 

Cut the tomatoes into bite size pieces. Add to bowl. Cut the mozzarella into halves. Add to bowl.Add pesto to the pasta. Mix well. Add a spoonful of pasta water (the water left after removing the pasta) and stir to help it all come together. 

Enjoy. 

Serving size 1 cup

*Since we are on weight watchers we of course tracked this recipe and found that each serving was 9 points. How we figured it out was: we took all the ingredients, put them in recipe builder and divided by the number of cups that it made. Oh yeah and I didn't even it the whole cup of pasta because the light wheat pasta was so filling. 

*By the way, this is not a sponsored post. It is just our life experiences. The links are just so you can see what attachment I am talking about. I do have a amazon referral account but it would take so many purchases for me to meet the threshold for payout that it doesn't really matter. 

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