Food - Homemade Pasta Dough and a White Wine Sauce

So, while I'm failing at my picture challenge (post to come about that) I'm loving my cooking challenge.

I might still be in the first week, but making 5 recipes a week is going to be awesome.  I'm really excited about this.

My very first recipe is.... Homemade pasta!  Which was so easy to make I was absolutely astonished.  Why don't people do this more often?!?!

I took 2 cups of flour (I used all purpose but supposedly semolina flour or bread flour works better) and put it straight onto the kitchen counter and made a 'well' in the middle.

I cracked 3 eggs into the well....

I used a fork to mix the eggs and bring the flour in.  Once it was too thick to mix with the fork I used my hands to knead the remaining flour into the dough.

I covered the dough in plastic wrap and left it in the fridge for 10-20 minutes. 

I took the dough out, split it in half and started running it through the pasta machine I found in the basement of our house. [Using a pasta machine made this infinitely easier.  You can, of course, roll the dough out by hand, but that's time consuming and a lot of work.  I think that you can buy pasta machines for relatively cheap, so if your going to try to make pasta often then you should maybe invest in one.]

You run it through the thickest setting, 4-5 times folding the dough in half each time, lightly dusting with flour after each time.  Then run it through a few more times, setting the width smaller each time. When you have the dough the thickness you want you can cut it into shapes or strips or run it through any shape cutters you might have with your pasta machine.  I picked a Linguine cutter!

You can then hang the pasta on a rack and dry it out, or use immediately.  I boiled up my pasta (it takes only 3-5 minutes for fresh pasta to cook), and added my sauce!  It was delish!

The sauce I made was super easy.

I sauteed some onions and garlic.  Then I added an entire bottle of white wine, and let it simmer to reduce.  At the last minute I threw in some shrimp, then poured it over my fresh pasta!  The sauce was perfect, it didn't overpower my noodles, which was exactly what I wanted.

The pasta was so good and so easy to make I'll be doing it all the time now.  I'm sure I'll also be experimenting with putting flavors [spinach, sun-dried tomato...] into my pasta!

So that makes 2 recipes down and 3 to go...