Monday, April 15 Homemade Pasta with Pesto and Veggies Rating: 4.5

So my mom sent me a neat new toy for my birthday – a pasta attachment for my KitchenAid mixer. I love my mixer and this gadget just makes it that much better. All of the pasta recipes that come with it contain eggs (eew!) so I used one from The Artful Vegan cookbook. I don’t use that book very often because the recipes are ridiculously invloved, but there are a few standout recipes in it that aren’t that complicated. I know, I know it’s one of the Millennium Restaurant books, so it’s bound to be difficult, but still…

Anyway, I use their pasta recipe when I make ravioli so I already knew it was easy, quick, and reliable. After a few false starts that involved not having the attachment on right and having it turn upside down and fall off, I was up and running and pasta was coming out. Since this was a one person operation, I had to stop the mixer a bunch of times to remove the cut pasta from the bowl and lay it out to dry so it didn’t get all tangled up and turn into a blob. I decided that for my very first time making this stuff, that I should definitely pick a shape that would be hard to work with. Not really – I had no idea it would be wonky when I started. I’m not sure if it was the dough or my technique – probably the latter – but my corkscrews didn’t all, well, corkscrew. Oh well. It doesn’t have to be pretty to taste good. As you can see, it made a lot so we let it dry and packed up the rest to use later. I made a quick batch of pesto, and we lightly sautéed fresh veggies – the usual suspects of spinach, broccoli, asparagus, bell pepper and grape tomatoes. Once the pasta was cooked – it cooks really fast, we mixed everything together so the veggies and pasta were coated in the lovely pesto. Seth took one bite and said it was the bset pasta he’d ever had. Score. We have a winning toy. This would be really good with leftover (or fresh) grilled veggies. We’ve done that plenty of times and it’s super yuumo. Seth also made his amazing garlic bread to round it all off. We are incapable of having pasta without garlic bread.