Hayley's Italian Kitchen

Mamma Mia, a new addition to my kitchen family arrived the other week:

A shiny silvery new pasta machine! I sort of bought it by accident- we were planning to make homemade pasta again using the bicep building pastacise method we've used before. But, we were having a bit of a wander around the metro centre and ended up in Lakeland, where it was quite reasonably priced.

So we made lasagne, entirely from scratch. I've never really made lasagne that often in life, as it seems rather faffy- by the time you've made the ragu, you've then got to put it in the oven, but you could have been eating it already if you were having good old spag bol. When I have made it in the past i've just used jars or pasta sauce and white sauce, with dried pasta sheets.

This time however, we made everything. Red sauce, white sauce, and pasta. Short of rearing the cows to milk them then mince them, we couldn't have homemade anything else in this lasagne.

The pasta dough is made

My saucy kitchen

The finished product was definitely worth all the effort- much better than a mangey microwave lasagne. The pasta was beautifully cooked, and it just tasted so much sweeter with the smugness of knowing you've made it all yourself.

Nom nom nom

The New Exercise Sweeping The Nation: Pastacise!

This weekend, we decided to make some pasta.

If you've no idea what this is about, you seriously need to look here

But, instead of taking the easy open packet and boil route, we thought we would make some from scratch.

Now I don't have a pasta machine. Nor, indeed, do I have enormously strong Italian Grandma type arms (although they are getting much, much stronger thanks to Nancy and Tony at Newcastle Strength and Performance) So if I'm honest, I didn't hold out too much hope for a brilliant result.

However, any excuse for a trip to Mmm Newcastle, so we purchased our tipo 00 flour, bunged it in a bowl, and cracked a load of eggs into it.

And that's it. only those 2 ingredients. I had assumed that pasta would be made with all sorts of complicated ingredients, and I really couldn't believe that it's actually only 2, really simple ingredients. However, we started to mix them and realised that the result was THE most sticky substance known to the human race. I mean, this stuff even trumps the inside of Tunnocks Tea-Cakes and Marshmallow fluff in the sticking stakes.

We soldiered on with kneading the dough, and after a long time of a lot of hard work and effort, we ended up with a nice, smooth pasta dough, which we cut into tagliatelle. I swear, making pasta really does give your arms a brilliant toning workout. I can feel an exercise DVD coming on!

It cooked really nicely, and whilst it was quite thick, when paired with this delicious Nigella Lawson recipe ragu (and a generous sprinkling of parmesan cheese), it made for a really satisfying meal.