Yes, yes, a hundred times yes from me. Nearly four years ago I found a pasta machine at a garage sale. I had been making pasta from scratch before that but rolling it out with a rolling pin, which meant that lasagna and ravioli were much more likely than spaghetti or tagliatelle. I wrote at the time that “I’m not sure at all whether it will be a stayer.” But…
I was planning to make three large males go around four of us, and then at the last minute two more arrived for lunch. And like loaves and fishes, three red claw went generously round six people as red claw pappardelle with a green salad and some garlic sourdough on the side.
It’s the southern hemisphere Halloween, and I totally get it why Halloween features pumpkin lamps. Halloween is the final harvest festival, and marks the start of the season of gathering in – firewood, mulch, water, pumpkins, passata, preserves, warm clothes, books, tribe and wisdom.
Though I’m very critical of the intensive farming of animals for meat, I’m not a vegetarian. If you’ve ever seriously tried to grow enough to feed your own household (let alone enough to fully support it), you will know that food webs include predators, prey, animals, plants, insects, funghi, bacteria – the whole complex web. If you take animals and predation out of the system, it teeters and falls.
In the scale of foods that are Popeye worthy, kale is about as dense a source of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants as you can get, including Vitamin K which is important for bone density and for brain health, and Vitamin A which is important for skin and eyes. But more uniquely, it’s also a source of some important anti-cancer phytochemicals.
This Tuesday Night Vego Challenge recipe uses egg noodles, which are exactly the same as pasta. I’m a relatively recent convert to home-made pasta and noodles. For years I used to think home-made pasta 1. required a pasta machine, and 2. was just a carrier for the sauce anyway. In fact I was wrong on both counts.
Home made from scratch pasta, made with real eggs, meets all the Witches Kitchen definitions of good – it’s high protein nutrient dense good-for-you. It’s made with local, in season ingredients without excessive packaging or storage costs good-for-the-world. And it tastes very very good.
This is a bit of a Tuesday Night Vego Challenge rules cheat. Now the days have started really lengthening, even the geriatric chooks are laying so handmade pasta with real eggs was in my mind. And then I was looking for a cake tin deep in the back of the shelf and came across a fluted flan tin that I forgot I had. And in a moment of inspiration realised…
I love my kitchen. It has a great big central kitchen bench in the middle of an otherwise very compact space (in a very compact house). I means cooking can be a social activity – several people can chop and stir and roll and fill at once. Kids can sit up at a stool and be involved, and if they play it right get to listen in on adult conversations.