Kitchen Pasta Maker Fun in the Summer - Featured Recipe, Aglio Olio!

Up here in the Northeast U.S., it's getting pretty hot.  We're in the throes of summer, with temps starting near 90 and only increasing from there this week.  And who wants to cook in heat like that?  Or eat, for that matter? 

This is the time of year I look for quick and easy recipes that don't heat up the house too much and don't sit too heavily in the belly.  A nice, simple, easy pasta recipe is a fallback in times like these.  Right up there with my grill.  And now that I have a grill with a side burner, even the pasta cooking can move outdoors when I want it to.  Although I do find that now that I am making fresh pasta at home, it's not so bad to cook it inside, as fresh pasta literally takes minutes to cook - just about three, has been my average.  I've also found the fresh pasta that I make with my kitchen pasta maker to be lighter than the commercial versions - an extra bonus to beat the heat!

This morning, I've just found a nice little recipe that is about as easy as it gets as far as making a fresh, light pasta meal with my kitchen pasta maker.  You'll probably recognize the site as it's been a recent feature, but I did want to highlight this great stand-by recipe for Aglio Olio (Garlic and Oil) Pasta.  Check it out, try it out, and enjoy!  I plan to ;)

For more great fresh pasta recipes for the home pasta maker, check out this book, too:

Pasta Fresca: An Exuberant Collection of Fresh, Vivid, and Simple Pasta Recipes

Kitchen Pasta Maker Foodie Site Feature: The Reluctant Gourmet.com

I promised you great websites to accompany your kitchen pasta maker, and here is the latest!

It's called the Reluctant Gourmet.com, and even the most ambitious of home cooks and amateur chefs can appreciate it - because no matter how much you love cooking, we all have days when we just want to simplify or learn a few new good tricks and tips and recipes.  And that is just what this site delivers!

The bonus is that the site includes an entire page of recipes dedicated just to pasta, which of course will make great companions for your home pasta making adventures!

Find the pasta recipes page here:
Reluctant Gourmet Pasta Recipes

Kitchen Pasta Maker Featured Video: How Pasta Is Made

Ever wonder how that commercial pasta is produced?  This pasta making video from the Discovery Channel tells you. It's an interesting piece for the kitchen pasta maker, and includes some little-known pasta history.  The results certainly are not as good as what your kitchen pasta maker will give you, but it's a bit of fun nonetheless!

Kitchen Pasta Maker Foodie Site Feature: The Cooking Blog

This week's Foodie Site Feature highlights a well-maintained and informative blog dedicated to food and cooking, aptly named, The Cooking Blog.  It is run by Wendy Cooper of Canada and includes things like recipes, simple, fast and cheap recipes (like this one for Spring Ramen Chicken Soup), restaurant reviews, and even some reipces, tips, tricks, and advice for the kitchen pasta maker :)  Check it out!  There's lots to keep you in the know and eating well!

Kitchen Pasta Maker Featured Video: Kneading Pasta Dough

Kneading pasta dough is an important step in the process of making homemade pasta.  It develops the dough and is integral in achieving the right consistency for the homemade pasta dough to work in your kitchen pasta maker.  And so, today's kitchen pasta maker featured video is a quick but useful video to help you learn how to manage this important step.

Ravioli Success! Courtesy of my New Kitchen Pasta Maker

So I did it.  I finally put my new kitchen pasta maker to work.  And it was a great success!

My youngest son loves ravioli, so in celebration of his birthday last week I decided to put my ravioli form to work and make him a batch.  This was the first run for any of the kitchen pasta maker equipment I had purchased.  It was also the first time ever that I had made either fresh homemade pasta or ravioli.  All in all, I'm calling it a success and a great first experience making pasta at home.

Because my kitchen pasta maker (the CucinaPro pasta machine I purchased a few weeks back from Amazon) was new, I made extra dough to begin with to run through and clean out all of the bits left from manufacture.  This is recommended for all new machines, and it did actually take quite a bit of cleaning.  Not difficult, but definitely something you want to plan for the first run through and leave the time and extra dough for.

When I bought my kitchen pasta maker, I bought a separate form for the ravioli, not a pasta maker ravioli attachment.  It was a ravioli maker and press, which I thought for me would be easier to manage than the ravioli attachment for the hand pasta maker (but who knows - maybe I'm wrong ;) ).  Thus, my method was to press the dough down to a thinness appropriate for the ravioli (on my machine I went down to the "7" setting - it goes to 9 but I thought 7 was thin enough), lay the form out right in front of the machine and lay it over the form right from the press.  Then it was press the form, fill, and run another layer over the top, and roll to seal and cut over the top of the form with the rolling pin.  [I did also end up with a little extra pasta dough, and so ran that through the linguine cutter on my kitchen pasta machine and refrigerated them, then cooked them up quick last night and tossed with some butter, garlic, salt and pepper.  In the words of that famous Ray, "Delish!"]

This method worked well.  It was a little time-consuming, but then I made a very large batch (probably 3 or 4 times the recipe) and it was my very first time.  All told, start to finish, I think I spent about two and a half hours.  That sounds like a lot, but keep in mind my learning curve and the fact that the pasta machine was new and so a fair amount of time was spent in set-up and cleaning, etc.  I did, however, also think that this would be a great project to do with a friend or two in assembly-line fashion (not necessary, but could be a good time with a bottle of wine :) ); this could especially be helpful if you were planning ahead and making a big batch to freeze and use in the future.

As for the ravioli, it tasted great and was a big hit.  The birthday boy ate so much he couldn't even finish his cake! For sure this is something I'll be doing again and again!

Kitchen Pasta Maker Video Feature: Kitchenaid Pasta Dough Recipe

I chose this video for our featured kitchen pasta maker video this week because it teaches you how to make dough with your Kitchenaid or stand mixer.  Note, it does show you how to use a KitchenAid mixer pasta maker attachment, but the first part is instruction for making the dough with the stand mixer - without the hand kneading and mess. 

I do own a KitchenAid, which I love and use to the level of abuse (but of course it takes it :) ), but I have not yet invested in a KitchenAid mixer pasta maker attachment.  I bought instead this hand-crank kitchen pasta maker for the affordability of it, but one day I certainly may invest in the KitchenAid pasta maker.  For now, my plan is to use the CucinaPro pasta maker that I did purchase but to mix the dough with my Kitchenaid - something like this:

Kitchen Pasta Maker CucinaPro 177 - In the house!

It's here!  My new kitchen pasta maker, the CucinaPro 177 CucinaPro Pasta Fresh, arrived last week.  Please do not let my lack of instantaneous posting make you think I was not excited or did not appreciate the arrival.  The real problem was that I was refinishing the hardwood floors in my kitchen and dining room and pantry; that made it a little difficult to get elbow-deep into making fresh pasta.  Soon, though, soon.  My floors have cured and we are ready to get things back in order.  As soon as my kitchen furniture is restored, I'll be trying out my new kitchen pasta maker, and I'll be bright back here to let you all know what I think and review this kitchen pasta maker!

For the time being, my initial impressions are that the CucinaPro 177 Pasta Fresh Pasta Machine is sturdy and seemingly well-built.  As many people said on the CucinaPro pasta maker reviews on Amazon, I actually was a bit surprised by the weight and construction of this kitchen pasta maker, considering that I bought for only about $30.  As we all know, these days 30 buck usually gets you a piece of flimsy plastic, but that is certainly not the case with this pasta maker.  Solid, weighty stainless- steel construction has me thinking this kitchen pasta maker will be a stable, handy small appliance for quite some time to come!

Sauces for the Kitchen Pasta Maker

What's homemade pasta without the sauce?  What you put on your homemade pasta is as important as what you put in it.  So along with our other kitchen pasta maker features, we'll be featuring great fresh pasta sauce recipes, too.  And I've got just the site and resource to get you started.  It's a great site devoted expressly to saucing, with a blog, information, tips, and much more; it also offers an excellent cheap, instantly downloadable e-book sauce cookbook available, too.  Find your next great fresh pasta sauce recipe and have a wonderful, homemade pasta meal on your table tonight, start to finish! 

Check It Out:

Saucing Website & Cookbook

Kitchen Pasta Maker Featured Video: Making Fresh Pasta Part 2

I had planned to post this pasta making video later this week or next, by why wait?  This second video from Blomsie completes the kitchen pasta maker experience, showing you how to use the pasta roller or homemade pasta machine.

Kitchen Pasta Maker - Featured Video, Pasta-Making Tutorial

It's highly recommended to use the power of the internet to ease your adventures in making homemade pasta by watching just how making pasta at home is done.  To that end, we'll be featuring some of the best pasta-making videos we can find to help you see just what your doughs should look like and how to use your kitchen pasta maker.

The video featured today is from "Blomsie".  It's a nice tutorial for the new kitchen pasta maker that will run you through the basics of prepping the pasta dough (one of the trickiest and most essential parts) in under 10 minutes, and get you started on your new culinary adventure!

Kitchen Pasta Maker Foodie-Site Feature of the Week

Ok so one of the things that I'd like to do here is feature some of the best of what's out there in the foodie field.  The plan is to make this a weekly feature and to highlight things like foodie blogs and great websites - could be recipe site features, great foodie sites for deals and steals, or like this one, foodie blogs.

So here goes and the first foodie site feature from Kitchen Pasta Maker Fun is a blog I've been following for quite a while now, called

Cooking By The Seat of My Pants

This blog is a feature of great foods, recipes, experiments in cooking and baking, and kitchen fun.  I love it because I get some really excellent recipes and ideas (including some great copycat recipes, too!), as well as lots of inspiration.  Best of all, though, this blogger is as unpretentious as they come, so no fear of being snubbed here, and loves to take chances and create new recipes - which in turn, inspires me to do the same!

Great job, CBSOP, keep it coming!  And for you readers, check it out and keep going back for more!

Guest Post: Weighing in on Finding a Kitchen Pasta Maker

I absolutely love fresh pasta, but was never sure where to start with the essential kitchen pasta maker. I love to cook but I must say that the notion of cooking my own pasta was a bit intimidating. I finally decided that I simply must have fresh pasta and that I wanted it to come from my own kitchen. I set out to find the perfect kitchen pasta maker but knew that might be a task in and of itself. There are plenty of sites out there to check out pasta maker reviews and find the one that best fit my needs, and so I decided to start slow and go for more of an attachment type of device, like a KitchenAid mixer pasta maker.

I looked up and down, went to stores, demos, and checked out a number of websites. I finally settled on the kitchen pasta maker that seemed to work best for me. I got a little nervous as I set out on this kitchen task—so unlike me with all of my domestic skills! I must say that the pasta maker does much of the work for you and I was pleasantly surprised. I would try it again and maybe even get a bit creative with the type of pasta that I make. One step of the fresh pasta meal conquered…can't wait to try it with my fresh sauce!!

Mary Frederick thinks homemade pasta is unbeatable. She recommends these kitchen pasta maker deals and pasta makers reviews.

Kitchen Pasta Maker on its Way!

Well, I did it.  After getting caught up and spending the entire morning (which was, of course, supposed to be spent doing other things ;)) on Amazon and eBay, I finally decided on my new kitchen pasta maker.  Being a newbie kitchen pasta maker, I wanted something inexpensive but not a cheap pasta machine, simple to use, but with enough features to do the job and simplify the process.  After sifting through many, many kitchen pasta makers, reviews, features, and so on, I finally landed on the following as my kick-starter kitchen pasta maker set.  I'll let you know in the future how it goes.  Oh - and I'll also give you some insight as to how I came to this decision out of the multitudes of choices in hand pasta makers and homemade pasta maker machines.

All in all, I decided a good starter kitchen pasta maker package for me was:

• naturally, an economical kitchen pasta maker
• a pasta drying rack
• an introductory homemade pasta-making cookbook
• and a ravioli maker - I'll be making our own cheese and growing the garden again soon, so this seemed to be a good option for me

Here is what I bought:
















I did strongly consider this one with the additional pasta maker attachments, but opted for the above for now...




...but I can see myself upgrading or adding to my new pasta machine in the future, and probably not that distant, either ;)

Simple Pasta Recipe to Get You Started

Here's a simple pasta recipe for the kitchen pasta maker.  Easy to follow, simple ingredients...everything the novice homemade pasta maker, like me, is looking for!  What I love even more is the fact that it, of course, uses eggs...which are in abundance around here these days, given the baker's dozen and more my backyard chickens are laying!

Apologies for the short post, but I've got sick little ones...but I did want to stop in and share this link!

Kitchen Pasta Maker Fun - Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog, where we strive to have lots of fun with kitchen pasta makers!  ...Or maybe just a bit of fun, with some great-tasting results ;)

Let me explain a little about this blog.  In order to do that, let me explain just a little about myself.

I'm a lot of things - a mom of 4 and a wife and all the things that implies, small-time farmer into self sufficiency, amateur cook, amateur baker, chicken raiser, web content writer, work-at-home-mom.....

Of these, probably one of the biggest things that occupies my time, whether actively or just in thought, is putting good, fresh, healthy, reliable, trustworthy food on the table.  Yes, that takes up a lot of time and energy, but it's a labor of love.  We truly love to increase the self-sufficiency of our home. 

More and more, I find myself moving towards more scratch baking and cooking.  With a little added effort, making things from scratch recipes with simple ingredients rather than from boxed and bagged mixes laden with preservatives (or worse), I can feed my family cheaper, healthier, more wholesome foods.

Out of this labor of love has been most recently born an interest in kitchen pasta makers, making fresh pasta (a dietary staple in our home), and all the tools, recipes, tips, and tricks that go along with that.  As it turns out, there are many other people out there interested in living in similar fashion, or just plain looking for better-tasting pasta options.  And so, I've decided to share what I'm learning along the way. 

And so, borne of that is this blog dedicated to the kitchen pasta maker and all its complements and potential.  I hope you'll continue to come back and to share your stories, resources, tips, and more.