Pasta Maker

Ahhh Kitchen Aid how I love thee.  I got these little beauties for the Easter egg hunt (perks of still living with the rents) which we actually celebrated in May after Sarah came home from college bc an Easter egg hunt with just me and my 16 yr old, too cool for the world sister would have been SO MUCH FUN!  Anyway, along with the little things that fit in eggs like erasers in the shape of frogs and fuzzy pom pom chickens and candy my mom writes a scavenger hunt clue in one of our eggs.  We then have to go find our one big present.  This was mine this year (it was 20% off at Bed Bath and Beyond but still this was expensive fyi).

Skills.  Not.

I, of course, immediately jumped in and made pasta that week!  Here is one of my first attempts.  As you can tell I hadn't gotten the hang of it yet.

Ok, now I can claim skills.

So much better!  I'm such a fast learner :D

Rollin,' rollin,' rollin.'

The basic concept is you attach the sheeter (thing that rolls pasta dough into sheets) to the KitchenAid mixer.  It has a dial on the side that goes from 1 to around 7.  You take a ball of pasta dough and put it through on level 1 to flatten it out.  Once you've put it through a few times, folding it over as you go, you change to level 2 which makes it a bit thinner.  And so on and so on.  If you go too thin too fast you'll end up with dough like the first picture.  It's all about incrementally changing and getting thinner . . . hmmm this sounds like an add for Weight Watchers (tried it but I actually like Livestrong.com better and livestrong is free).

Then once the pasta is flat enough you change the attachment on the front from the sheeter to the spaghetti (or linguini) maker and feed the flat pasta sheet through.  For obvious reasons you would only feed it through once.

Move over Mario Batali!

Ah yummy, fresh, looooong spaghetti!  And no I did not cut it in half.  My family just had to twirl and twirl and twirl and I'm not in the least bit sorry.  Ha.