I usually eat some type of pasta two or three times a week. Lasagne, spaghetti parmigiano, a lovely fusilli with roasted butter nut squash and red onions in autumn, or stuffed conchiglioni.....there's so many delightful variations .
But since this challenge began I've had to cut down...so I decided to try making my own. Granted, the pasta flour doesn't come from Leicestershire or Rutland, but my eggs do....from a couple of miles down the road.
I tried to roll it out by hand, but I'm no expert...no Italian mama who can get sheets of pasta dough into an enviably ,elastic thinness....I needed a pasta machine. Now all the research I did suggests that the Imperia is by far the best...in terms of superiority and longlevity. I priced them out on the internet, but they're not cheap.
But a couple of weeks my friend Laura persuaded me it really was a good idea to get up at the crack of dawn and go to a car boot sale. There ....sitting waiting to be bought was one.Yes, the very same machine, virtually brand new in a box for with instructions for £17. And dear readers, I bought it!
A good friend Anne Marie was coming over that afternoon to see me and have supper.When I say she was coming to see me...it was to see the new puppy Boo! Anyway, I thought I would get out the new machine and we could have a glass of wine and make pasta. So that's what we did.....
We mixed the pasta flour and eggs -
Well I did..... and in the background you may notice some plastic freezer bags....back in October, I froze what seemed like gallons of a gutsy, garlicy tomato sauce I made from the pounds and pounds of tomatoes I grew. A couple of those bags of sauce were just what I needed ...here's the recipe...
and the lamb mince came from a farm about four miles away.
Then Anne Marie got on with the kneading.....she was good at that....
She was also very good at setting the Imperia up and beginning to roll the dough through the machine
The sheets of pasta became thinner and thinner......this was fun.....
A few glasses of wine later, we were woofing down a lovely lasagna and salad ....in our hurry to eat it though, I completely forgot to take a photo of it before we dived in!
I'm so pleased Laura persuaded me to go the car boot, delighted I bought the Imperia, loved the lasagna, aand so chuffed that by making my own pasta, I may just achieve my challenge that eighty per cent of what I eat this year comes from Leicestershire and Rutland.
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