Food (Mis)Adventures

NorthernMommy has been experimenting with gluten-free foods recently, and today she brought home some gluten-free flour with the idea of making pasta from scratch. NorthernDaddy was into that - he's been toying with the idea of making home-made pasta for months (but has found that it's difficult to set aside the time needed).

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Pasta is remarkably simple in its compostion and construction; flour, eggs, salt, water, oil. Mix it together, roll it out, shape it, and cook. We can do this! Check our ingredients....eggs - straight from our chickens today. Salt - only the finest sea salt. Oil - good stuff (really expensive and incredibly good tasting). Water - um....water from our well (it's an acquired taste!). What's left? Of course: flour. NorthernMommy brought home some gluten-free all-purpose flour. Ingredients: rice flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, chick pea flour, navy bean flour, sorghum flour, and xanthan gum. Sounds healthy and natural, but keep that navy bean flour in the back of your mind - we will be seeing it again.

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We gathered 'round as a family to make our first batch of yummy home-made pasta. NorthernMommy and NorthernToddler measured out and mixed the dry ingredients.

Huh? I've got flour where?

NorthernDaddy combined the "wet" ingredients and mixed them with the dry. Then, as per the instructions, started to knead the pasta dough. Instead of the reassuring and familiar aromas that NorthernDaddy is used to from baking yeast breads, the kitchen began to smell faintly like potatoes. (Remember the kinds of flour in the mix?) After a couple of minutes of kneading, the unmistakable odor of beans began to spread through the house. NorthernDaddy has a distinct hatred for certain legumes. Pretty much any bean that has that special "beany" smell and nasty grainy texture goes straight into the "Will Not Eat" category. Lima beans, lentils, and navy beans are all fit to be cooked and tossed straight into the compost bin. (Black beans, on the other hand, are an essential food staple in the NorthernToddler household.) So, the emergence of 'bean vapors' from our pasta dough was taken as a bad sign.

We may have shortcut the resting times for the dough - it never became perfectly pliable and easy to form. As we rolled it up to cut, the dough crumbled and generally made a mess of itself. It's possible that the textures of the different flours and the lack of gluten had something to do with the results.

The NorthernClan pushed onward - we're having home-made pasta no matter what! NorthernMommy slid the pasta into the roiling water and, as it cooked, sampled a piece. Directly after her taste test, she handed over the cooking duties to NorthernDaddy and went off to toast some bread for herself and NorthernToddler to eat (instead of having the pasta).

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NorthernDaddy is tougher than the other two pansies in the house. He was going to have a meal of the first home-made pasta ever created in his home.

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How did it taste?

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Like this:

(Side note: dessert was Milk Chocolate Covered Kettle Chips. Yup - ridged potato chips covered with chocolate. Created by none other than our beloved Snowflake Chocolates here in Jericho. It's an odd combination, but the chocolate is so good that we're snarfing down the chips!)