Martha Stewart (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A curse on your head Martha Stewart,
Maybe not a curse but perhaps a friendly pigeon could fly above you and do what pigeons do on top of your perfectly streaked coif.
I want revenge. Frankly Martha, I’m good and mad In your cookbook, the old one, that came our before food porn and coffee table cookbooks, you led me to believe that it was easy to make pasta at home.
Home made pasta, won’t that dazzle my guests I thought somewhat pridefully.
So I took out my decade old but never used and still in the original package pasta attachment.
I couldn’t figure out how to put the darned thing together–maybe that was a cosmic hint but then my 10 year old genius of a son snapped here, and turned there and voila, my machine was fully operational. I made the dough following your recipe Martha, Then I put it in the pasta maker.
I was expecting play-doh extrusion. Insert dough glob on one end watch the spaghetti strands come out the other. That happened all right but it took hours, the dough lumbering through the machine with excruciating slowness. It might have taken days, even weeks for that lump of dough to turn into enough noodles to serve four adults if I hadn’t given up in despair.
After almost a day and a half minus time for sleeping and household chores I had 15 home made spaghtti strands all of them hopelessly glued together after immersion in boiling water. So I bailed out. I threw the stands and the remaining dough into the trash and cooked up a pot of Barilla..
I did use your sauce. Well, Martha, you blew it on the pasta, but you redeemed yourself with this sauce which I now offer.
Easy Alfredo Sauce adapted from Martha Stewart
Simmer one cup of heavy cream (15 percent fat is fine too) Don’t let it boil. Slowly dribble in two egg yolks and mix together. Then add 1/2 cup grated cheese (Martha says Parmesan but I used Jerusalem generic yellow and it tasted just fine) and a large lump (3 T) of butter. Let it all melt together. Keep the flame very low and stir continually with a wooden spoon guarding zealously against congellation. (my sauce did congeal a bit but it still tasted fine)
Add a pinch of salt and pepper and if you like a micro pinch of nutmeg.
You can also add , 1/2 cup of steamed broccoli or sauteed mushrooms are nice.
Serve over the pasta. Yum.
Start your diet the day after.
I totally agree that people who saying making homemade pasta is easy and not much more time than boiling a dried are lying, but when you get the hang of it is is not too hard and is worth the effort.
I have a pasta roller so I don’t know how this machine works, but definitely think of trying a different dough for that machine.