Pasta Verde

I have a problem…. I freely admit it…. I’m a pasta addict. I’ll eat the stuff in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and colors. I’ll eat it with red sauce, green sauce, white sauce, no sauce!.  I don’t know if I’ve ever met a pasta I wouldn’t eat.

One of my favorite cookbooks (and I have way too many) is The Pasta Bible. If you like to make pasta, and make it frequently, then I highly recommend adding this book to your collection. The spine of my book is broken, if that tells you anything about how much I’ve used it.

Like any good addict, I’ve also got paraphernalia to accompany my addiction. My husband is my enabler. He gave me my paraphernalia as a Christmas gift about 14 years ago. My paraphernalia is a Cuisinart pasta extruder.  The machine has been discontinued, but the company that made it for  Cuisinart  is still around, and they manufacture a similar Lello pasta maker. Even better, Lello’s machine costs much less than mine did. Fourteen years of service is a great testimonial to this work horse of a pasta machine. Also, if you own a Kitchen Aid mixer, I’ve been hearing great things about the pasta attachment available for use with it.

The following recipe works great for my machine, which does all the hard work. All I have to do is dump the ingredients into the mixing bowl and let it mix for several minutes. Then I stand there and cut the pasta to the desired length as it comes out of the extruding die. Assuming most of you don’t have a machine, I should probably provide a tutorial on making pasta by hand. The gal who wrote this tutorial uses a hand crank machine, but you can use a rolling pin.

This pasta’s  vibrant green color comes from chlorophyll.  If you missed it, you can learn how to extract chlorophyll in my previous post

Pasta Verde

4 cups durum semolina flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 eggs
1/4 cup chlorophyll

Place the eggs and chlorophyll in a measuring cup and mix together.  You need exactly 1 cup of liquid. If needed, add enough water to the mixture to bring it up to 1 cup.

Add your liquid ingredients to your dry ingredients according to the method you are using (make a well in the flour and add the liquid ingredients to the well if you are making pasta by hand). It should look something like this when you’re finished mixing.

Once your pasta dough is mixed you can roll it out and cut it, or in my case stand there and cut the pasta as it comes out of the machine.  I made rigatoni.

A few comments on my ingredients.  I try to use as many local and organic ingredients as possible. However, I live in a rather remote community where organics can be difficult to obtain.  I use organic, free range eggs from my own flock, but organic semolina is a difficult animal to locate and I’ve been forced to have it shipped in. A great place for organic grains and flours is Heartland Mill out of Kansas.

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