Homemade Pasta and Pesto

The Carnivore and I took a once-in-a-lifetime type of trip to Europe last summer. Over four weeks we went on a 7 day Mediterranean cruise and spent time in Paris, Nice, Rome, Venice, and most importantly London, where he proposed.

Best. Proposal. Ever.

Quick Recap: I'm obsessed with London, Tower of London, Crown Jewels, "Are you jealous of the diamonds?," and the I got my own sparkly, amazingly perfect engagement ring. And, back to the food...

Our time in Italy sort of made us pasta snobs. I've only had one really decent bowl of pasta since in a French inspired cafe in Memphis. Random. I've wanted  to learn to make my own pasta since.

Enter another incredible feature of the juicer we recently bought. It will extrude 2 sizes of spaghetti, linguine, and fettuccine. Huge selling point due to the cost of the juicer.

And, since the last week of the month is "leftover week" I didn't have any fancy dinner to make and freeze so I decide to tackle making my own pasta for part of our special Sunday meal. Our favorite Italian dish was a pesto dish so that's where I decided to start.

Making the pasta took some trial and error to get the dough consistency right but was way easier than I thought it would be. I can't wait to try adding different juices and seasonings!

egg well in the flour

The Pasta

Ingredients: 2 cups flour, 2 eggs, 2 tbs olive oil, 2 tsp salt, and 8 tbs water

balls of pasta!

The Process: maybe 20 minutes to make 2 balls of pasta (6 servings). Then I let the dough balls rest for about 45 minutes. Feeding the dough through the juicer was very easy but took some coordination to pull the noddles, cut them, and get them in the boiling water all in one fluid motion.

The Pesto

the basil smelled SO GOOD!

Ingredients: 2 cups of living basil leaves, 5 cloves of raw garlic, nearly 2 ounces of raw pine nuts, and 1/2 cup of olive oil

The Process: washed and dried the basil, peeled the garlic, and emptied the pine nuts in to the food processor. added olive oil. I did this while the dough was resting. took about 15 minutes.

  

The Results

makes me want to lick the screen