Cooking With J - Homemade Pasta and Alfredo Sauce

This will be the first and only installment of Cooking with J till August when she comes back from LA. I miss her dearly and this is for her.. She's my lil sous chef, she can perfectly cut ANYTHING I put in front of her, shes a master baker and a color queen (she mixes food coloring to perfection) This is our first documented forray into chronically our crazy cooking adventures"
Homemade Pasta and Alfredo Sauce

So while shopping for sandals with J ended up at Ross. There's a little secret about Ross, . Marshalls, TJ Max you guys are my friends so I will clue you in, they have a FANTASTIC smorgasbord of kitchen utensils/tools pots pans, cutting boards you name it. Just find the isle with pots and pans, and bowls and you will find this treasure chest. So we look for sandals no luck I tell myself "well let me just go and see what they have" all the while J is saying "Mom, focus, focus, focus!" Of course I get to that aisle and I find a pasta machine the SAME EXACT one from work and school but just a wii bit smaller for $20!! WTF! So of course I snatched it up amongst a few other things. The next Sunday it was pasta time. I didn’t take pix of us making the dough, but here is the ingredients below pretty simple stuff

Home-made Pasta using AP flour

2 cups - flour
A lil something about this, at school we always use semolina flour which is the authentic flour used in Europe for pasta, but good luck finding this in your local grocer. Whole foods is your friend. I was shocked that Kroger didn't have it even in their natural food section either. So used AP flour and my pasta turned out perfect. Below is our recipe

AP Flour Pasta

3 whole eggs

2 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp salt

½ cup water or as needed

Sift flour on a clean surface (like your counter) make a well (hole) in the flour (see pix above), add your eggs, salt, o. oil and water till its a nice dough consistency. Form a ball wrap it in saran wrap to rest. We rested ours overnight. The next day we divided the dough and got to rolling..I mean she was COVERED in flour but that's her thing..

 

Rolled out ready to cut















Fettuccine made! We hung these on wire hangers in the kitchen to dry very ghetto but it works sorry no pics of that.

To cook, have a pot of boiling water heavily salted. Cook about 2 mins as this is fresh and will not need the same amount of cooking time as store bought pasta. When done cooking drain and dump in ice bath. Strain again and toss with olive oil. Here's our fettichini after cooking

On of J's favorite things is Alfredo sauce which is simple my recipe below:

1 cup - fresh mozzarella

1 cup - fresh Parmesan

1 ½ cup - heavy cream

3 – garlic cloves minced

¼ cup- onions sliced very thin

2 tbsp olive oil

½ tsp - liquid smoke (hickory)

parsley – finely chopped

In a sauce pan heat oil, add onions cook for 2 mins add garlic cook till both are translucent. Then add heavy cream heat till simmer add both cheeses stirring till smooth. Add liquid smoke and salt/pepper to taste.

Toss with pasta. Sprinkle parsley on top and serve hot!

I had left over chicken from the night before, so I utilized that to top that..