My first attempt at pasta!

I don't know if anyone else has ever had a go at homemade pasta, but I watch it on TV all the time and it looks so easy I just thought... I may as well give it a go! And I guess it is pretty easy... but only when you know what you're doing! So this is a little bit about my first attempt at pasta - I wouldn't call it a total failure but neither would I call it a success - but practice makes perfect, right?



I was following this recipe (as accurately as I could!) for Spinach and Ricotta Tortellini, which I made in advance and froze for a couple of weeks. Then I roughly followed the recipe for for a Butter, Sage and Pine Nut Sauce, and cooked some of the pasta up tonight for tea!


When making the pasta, I got in a bit of a mess - I always get in a mess when there's flour involved - but I was fairly pleased with the ball of stuff I had that sort of resembled the pasta dough I was aiming for. It was at this point that I realised I didn't have a rolling pin (I now do, as well as a pasta maker, after telling this story to my mum and boyfriend just before Christmas!)

As I was making these around the gift giving period, I improvised with the closest thing I could find to a rolling pin - the cardboard tube from a roll of wrapping paper! Needless to say, the rolling of the pasta was not as smooth or as thin as it should have been and the tortellini was probably ruined from here on... but I'm not a quitter!





The spinach and ricotta filling was fine to make, but spooning it into my little slabs of pasta and trying to not get in even more of a mess was a little trickier! Anyhoo, I managed to make them and then wrapped them individually in cling film to freeze so as not to stick the tortellini together.

 

Tonight I boiled my little funny-shaped attempts at tortellini and cooked the pine nut, sage and butter sauce and dished it up... and I was pleasantly surprised! For something that could have been a total disaster, it definitely tasted like pasta and the thinner areas around the filling were pretty good! Some of it, admittedly, was too thick and a bit chewy and they were all shapes and sizes... but not bad for a first attempt!



I'll definitely be giving it another go sometime soon, but I will not use a tube of wrapping paper and I will try to have a finished dish that looks little more like tortellini!