11 November 2011

Cooking from itch

I've only mentioned my pasta machine once here, I think, but it's proved to be one of the more heavily-used of the kitchen gadgets I possess. One thing I really like about it is the ability to mix flours so that I get a light wholemeal pasta. I've always found 100% wholewheat pasta to be too stodgy, whereas white pasta just doesn't fill us up for very long. It's a similar story with bread, although I use a different mix of flours with pasta. With my bread I usually make it half-wholemeal, half-white. When it comes to pasta I prefer a mix that's a quarter-wholemeal, three-quarters white.


Tonight I made spaghetti bolognese. Yes, it does take a bit longer, making the pasta first, but not as long as you'd think, with the machine doing most of the work.

I used one of the frozen batches of tomato sauce made from the greenhouse tomatoes, bulked up with carrots I'd harvested from the garden last weekend. Our onion crop was disappointing this year, so it contained store-bought onions, but at least the herbs were fresh from the garden. I steamed a few spinach leaves and sugar snap peas from the greenhouse over the boiling pasta and that was that. Feel like I've come a long way from the days when most of a meal like this would have come out of a packet, jar or tin.

The phrase 'cooking from itch' isn't mine, I should add. I heard it the day I bought the pasta machine at the yard sale and have been meaning to use it ever since!

3 comments:

Linda said...

Looks delicious!! I have never made pasta! I wonder if it tastes different from store bought?

Helen said...

Love that expression. I think I'll borrow it.

Amanda said...

Linda - my kids say that it tastes better than store bought. I prefer it, although I'm not sure that it's better: just different!