A mother-daughter conversation on food and cooking (mostly)

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Homemade Pasta with Pesto and Green Beans


The pesto Lawson made over the weekend was so fresh and good and perfumey that I decided it deserved some homemade pasta. The combination of pesto, homemade pasta, and green beans is not untraditional (though I skipped the potatoes).

The pasta recipe (from both Marcella Hazan and Jack Bishop) was simple: 1 cup of flour and two eggs, mixed in a food processor and then kneaded by hand. I ended up adding a good bit more flour during the kneading and rolling, but stiff pasta dough is not a bad thing.

After reading Ms. Hazan's rant in More Classic Italian Cooking about how pasta machines are evil, I nonetheless pulled out Lawson's lovely old hand-cranked Atlas pasta machine and proceeded to make some fettucine. Here it is waiting to be cooked. The local eggs I used had vibrant, almost orange yolks, which made the raw pasta a lovely yellow.

We had it with the barest salad: red romaine, lemon juice, salt, olive oil, and pepper.

1 comment:

Kris said...

So beautiful! I had a hand-cranked pasta machine for many years, and thought it was a lot of fun.