Making homemade pasta. ( Archived) (7)

Years ago when I was married we bought a food processor called Oster Kitchen Center and we decided to get all the attachments available for it including and ice cream maker and a pasta making attachment. The ice cream maker was kind of a waste because it actually cost more to make than to buy at the store. Recently I've been playing with the pasta maker and besides being a little bit of work it's also a lot of fun. So far I've made 2 batches of thin spaghetti and 1 batch of Rigatoni. The recipe calls for 4 1/2 cups of flour, 1/3 cup of veg oil and 4 eggs and about 3/4 cup of water. That's it! You first have to blend everything into a dough ball and let it rest for 5 minutes when you can start feeding it into the extruder and out comes the noodles. It helps to have a mixer attachment with dough hooks which I also have. I do something a little different though, I position the extruder on the stove alongside a pot of boiling water and let the noodles drop right into the water. This way they don't stick together. A gallon of pasta equals about 8 meals so the cost per meal is ridiculously cheap and the taste is way superior to store bought. Plus being freshly made it cooks in only 5 minutes, not 12-15.
Cooked pasta can be kept for weeks in the fridge submerged in cold water. A little trick I learned when I was destitute.

Hey venus

I like to cook. When I lived on a farm we had only a wood stove in the living room and a big old wood burning cast iron cook stove in the kitchen. That stove weighed 550 lbs. No other heat. I got the cook stove from a friend when his grandma died. She bought it brand new in 1946. We carried that stove down 4 flights of stairs. I learned to cook on that stove in fact one time I cooked a whole Thanksgiving dinner including the turkey in that stove. After I moved I had to learn how to cook on electric all over again. Cooking on wood is more art than science. You have to use different types of wood and even different sizes to control the temp. Not to mention adjusting the draft.
I use to bake a lot of bread in that stove too which taught me how to make and handle dough. That came in handy when making pasta cause basically it starts out as dough.

There is a Chinese dish very similar to lagman called Lo Mein. Very popular in the US. I guess you'll just have to learn how to make it yourself.