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  Robin and I love to eat and to cook, especially pasta dishes (and breakfast, if it’s omelets). After watching a million different Food Network shows where the chefs made their pasta from scratch, we decided that we needed to learn how to do it. Robin’s sister, Cheryl, gave us a KitchenAid stand mixer a few years ago, and KitchenAid makes a ton of different attachments for their mixers so we got us a box with a pasta roller and cutters, a bag of flour, and we proceeded to make some noodles.

The first thing that we learned is that making pasta is all about the dough, shocking huh? We followed the recipe that came with the pasta attachments and ended up with this kind dry, clumpy, flour stuff that absolutely was not going to turn into the dough balls that you see on TV. Pasta dough is pretty simple stuff; flour, eggs, salt, and olive oil, so fixing what we’d done wasn’t gonna be rocket science. So off to the internet, and turns out that getting the consistency of dough that you can feed through the pasta roller is just a balancing act between flour and egg. Who knew?

Since our dough wouldn’t hold together we added an egg to our mixture. We learned right then and there that egg needs to be added a little at a time, adding an entire egg is a BAD idea. We ended up with a dough that absolutely held together but was sticky and gooey and there was no way in hell it was going through the pasta roller. So, time for a little more flour. Having learned our lesson with the egg, we proceeded cautiously and added a tablespoon of flour at a time until the mixer produced a dough ball that held together and wasn’t glued to our fingers. Voila!

Long story short, or not, we created our first homemade pasta noodles. We made spaghetti noodles, and I think we were both floored at how delicious fresh pasta noodles were compared to good old American Beauty dry noodles. I don’t think that I’m much different than a lot of men (and some women, I’m sure) in that I always viewed pasta as a vehicle to get meat sauce and cheese into my pie hole. Now I prefer a plate of pasta with a few tablespoons of sauce and shredded Parmesan, where before I basically ate meat sauce & spaghetti stew. Fresh pasta noodles are a bit of work to make, start to finish it’s typically 30 minutes. But once made they only need to be in boiling water for 2-3 minutes, so time-wise it’s not that different. And there is no comparison in flavor!

We taught Robin’s son, Travis, and his wife, Jessica, how to make pasta when they visited us in beautiful downtown Ivins a couple of months ago. We are told that they are absolutely hooked on fresh pasta and would never buy the dry stuff again. Okay, I’m not sure that they actually said that, but they do really like homemade noodles.

I attached some photos of our most recent creation, ‘World’s Best Lasagna,’ which is literally the title of the recipe. But as luck would have it, it IS the World’s Best Lasagna, especially if it’s made with homemade pasta sheets! Lasagna is a lot more complicated and time consuming than most of the other pasta dishes that we make (although not nearly as complicated as ravioli). But we do it as a team, Robin does the sauce and the cheese mixture and I do the pasta, and eventually we end up with this amazing pan of goodness. We are going to add a section to our blog with recipes that our children have asked Robin for and that they have loved all their lives. We’ll be sure to include ‘World’s Best Lasagna’ when we get it up and running.

Footnote: Everyone knows that lasagna is always better the next day. Well turns out that the ‘next day’ after Robin and I made lasagna was the day before I had to get a colonoscopy and I wasn’t allowed to eat any food all day. Bummer! I’ll make up for it tomorrow after my fun little procedure. Hopefully they don’t give me any bad news or it might be the last time anything tastes good.