I got to use the pasta maker on some white rice flour pasta, and it turned out, resonantly well, for the first time out.

Pasta maker

I thought, wrongly, that this machine would do it all, flatten the dough, and make it into strips, and all that stuff. My sweetie, who got it for me, kept urging me to watch the youtube video on it. If you watch it, it will all make sense. But I hate watching instructions, i would rather read, so i read as much as i could, and it appears that what this does, at least the basic stuff, is flatten the dough.

And, here is the kicker, you have to let it go through several times, at smaller and smaller widths, so that it gets flatter. Easier than trying to do ti with a rolling pin, but not much nicer looking, just thinner.

Draining pasta

So, what was the verdict? Cartoonist like it enough to pack it in her lunch for school, and the marinara sauce I made seemed to help as well.

I even at a little of it when I was ill, but not too much, not knowing when I would be well again, and no knowing if Cartoonist would want to make anything on her own, while I was ill.

Cartoonist's take on my cooking

Putting everything together may not seem hard to others but to my mom and i it was complete bloody murder!! Having guests this week has made it hard on us since for some reason or other none of them really know how to cook, leaving us to provide and make food for them. As a going away or last good meal before you leave party thing we decided to make pasta with sauce and salad. Course my mom hasn’t ever made a full fledged meal all at once. She always just made maybe a pasta thing here, sauce there. But never all at once..My mom went nuts.

4 hours…thats how long it took..FOUR BLOODY HOURS!!! just to make pasta, sauce, salad, and meatballs. We were going to make it vegetarian but NOOOOO someone wanted MEAT! MANLY MEATY MEAT!! Not to mention we both tired from running around with my grandma to pick up all the blasted ingredients!! After all of it was done we were finally ready to taste it all. Course her sweetie asked if the pasta was fully cooked which was a BIIGG red flag right there. The rest of the evening felt like judging in “Iron Chef America”.

So, here is what the final mix was:

• 2 3/4 cups of non-gluten flour
• 5 Eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon of alt
• 1/2 cup of pureed carrots

Mixing the dough

The book is kind of cool, but I think it expects you to check other sources, because, although it explained how to mix it with our hands, it didn’t explain how to cut it up.

kneading the dough

Kneading the dough was sort of fun, and the dough seemed to be doing what it was supposed to, until I got to the part where I had to roll it out by hand, as I didn’t have a pasta press, or whatever it is called.

Cut up pasta

I fought I found a good source on the “How Stuff Words” website that showed people rolling out the pasta and then cutting it up, but they also showed people getting it really thin and hanging it up to dry.  I have never had luck with making pastry of any kind thin. I simply can’t do it. The dough always sticks to either the board or to the rolling pin, or to my hands, or  to something.  It just doesn’t work, and didn’t work this time either.

Testing the taste

One of the thing that the website said and the book both said was to drop the dough in boiling water, and then let it cook until it was al dente. I let it drain int he sink, and wondered if it would work. Cartoonist took the first bite, and said it tasted like pasta should, so I figured that I had sort of succeeded.

Now to just figure out how to make it thinner.

Not quite a kitchen failure, but not quite a success either.