Pasta holds a special place in our memories of childhood. Even if you didn’t grow up Italian, chances are you remember eating long strands of spaghetti and slurping up the sauce as you went. Pasta is made of simple ingredients: flour, eggs, olive oil and water. Don’t let the simplicity of the ingredients fool you into thinking that commercially made pasta is no different from homemade. Homemade pasta is true comfort food and easy to make. In our house, the making of pasta becomes a collaboration. There is something for everyone to do, no matter how young or how old. And the fruits of our labors end up in a wonderful family dinner that we all enjoy together.
The key to making great pasta is to get the dough to the right consistency and then rolling it to an even thickness before cutting it into various shapes. Some cooks prefer to roll the dough out by hand using a rolling pin and a smooth surface, like a wooden cutting board or a marble slab. I recommend the use of a pasta machine to achieve expert results consistently. With so many different types of machines on the market to choose from, the only decision you’ll have to make is manual versus an electric model. Good manual hand cranked machines should be heavy and have a base that clamps to the table or surface you are working on. Atlas, Imperia and CucinaPro are quality names for manual machines. Weston, Lello and Imperia all make electric pasta machines, and Kitchenaid does double duty by offering an attachment to its standard mixer. Although I have the Kitchenaid pasta attachment, I prefer to use my hand crank Atlas pasta machine, because it always seems like more fun to have one person turn the crank while someone else catches the dough.
If you are going to mix the dough by hand, start by placing the flour in a large bowl and make a well in the center. Crack the eggs into a smaller bowl and beat them lightly to break the yolks. Add the oil and water and mix well before pouring the liquids into the well in the center of the flour. Continue to mix with a fork or a wooden spoon until the dry ingredients are moistened and begin to clump together. Now roll up your sleeves and get ready to get your hands on the dough to finish the mixing.
Lightly dust flour onto your hands, to prevent sticking, and grab one part of the clump. Fold that part onto the center of the dough, press down and out toward the rim of the bowl. Continue to fold and press the dough and rotate the bowl as you do so until the dough no longers sticks to the sides and you have one piece of dough. Turn this out onto a lightly floured surface and knead the dough for 2 to 3 minutes longer, turning and folding the dough into intself. This activates the gluten in the flour which gives the dough its elastic properties.
You are done kneading when the dough is soft throughout, you can’t feel any lumps, the surface has a sheen to it and it feels and looks smooth. If the dough seems too sticky add a little flour, a little at a time, while you are kneading. If the dough seems too dry or hard, sprinkle a little water on the dough and continue to knead it until it becomes soft and pliable. When you have finished kneading the dough, give it a rest by letting it sit on the board covered with a clean, soft kitchen towel for about 30 minutes. This will relax and soften the dough so it will be easier to roll out.
Your pasta machine will come with basic instructions on how to process the dough. The basic steps are to roll pieces of dough through the rollers at thinner and thinner settings until you get nice, elongated, resilient pieces of dough. From there you cut the dough into whatever shapes you want. Dough may be cut and formed by hand, like simple papardelle, which are strips about 1 1/2 inches wide. All the pasta maker machines come with some attachments for cutting the dough. Tagliatelle and tagliolini are common pasta shapes that most of the manual machines produce. Electric pasta machines frequently have attachments that can extrude the dough into shapes like spaghetti and capellini.
After you have cut and shaped your pasta, the pasta needs to dry out a bit before it is cooked. Dry the pasta at room temperature on a lightly floured board or baking sheet. The flour helps keep the pieces of pasta from sticking to each other and helps seal the noodle. If you have made more pasta than you need for the meal you can freeze it on a baking sheet and then put the frozen pasta into freezer bags or containers for future use. If you just had a ravioli making party, you will be able to enjoy homemade raviolis any time. Pasta also dries well, although you will still want to cook it us within a couple of days because your dough does not have preservatives in it. Long pasta shapes can be dried in little nests or you can use a pasta drying rack, which allows you to dry the pasta as long threads.
Once your family has had a hand in making fresh pasta at home and eating the results, you won’t want to go back to commercially processed pasta again. Homemade pasta has a delicate, rich flavor and a smoother texture than store bought pastas. Making pasta at home is a fun family project that everyone can do together and it will become one of the warm and comforting memories you share in the future. So start a family tradition of fun and laughter and good food. Make pasta-making a regular event in your kitchen.
Making fresh homemade pasta has been a Lauder family event for years. Family, friends and neighbors all take a hand in making the dough and sitting at the table to feast on the results. Watch a video on rolling dough through a pasta machine on Geri’s website, browse great cookbooks and pick out a pasta machine for your next family pasta party.
Filed under Negative Calorie Foods by on Feb 4th, 2010. Comment. 
Chocolate is without a doubt, one of the favorite taste treats. You can enjoy it and relieve your own stress or send a wonderful chocolate gift to someone you love. This makes it easy to understand why chocolate gift baskets are so popular. Your selection to add to your gift basket can range from dark chocolates, milk chocolate, white chocolates, liquor filled and combinations of these and more. Luckily, they’ve even created a great selection for diabetics that are gourmet sugar free chocolates which are really incredible.
The easiest way to satisfy a chocolate craving is to indulge. A few simple pieces of gourmet sugarfree chocolate will make you feel good. Since they are sugar free chocolates, you can feel comfortable with a little indulging and also send them as gifts to anyone that loves the real taste of gourmet chocolate without the sugar. Don’t over indulge ,however, even if the chocolates are sugar free chocolate. Make sure that you’ve looked at how much sugar liquor is in the chocolates that you are enjoying.
Rather than buy an off the grocery store shelf box of sugar free chocolate, express your own or match the recipient’s style and taste by choosing a customized box of gourmet sugar free chocolates. If you pick a simply scrumptious selection of sugarfree chocolate and dress it up in a beautiful box and loaded with ribbon, it’s sure to impress and be an instant success. You don’t need to choose basic sugar free chocolate, look for selections such as gourmet sugar free almond buttercrunch or sugar-free peanut clusters and pecan pralines to name only a few that are available.
Unlike chocolates made from artificial sweeteners, sugar free chocolates are not bitter. Maltitol helps make these chocolates as sweet as those made with sugar but with fewer calories so there’s no need to worry about having tooth decay or gaining weight! Maltitol also maintains the rich creamy texture of chocolates. This is one of the few sweeteners that is so good, many don’t even know that they are having sugar free chocolates if they aren’t told.
Maltitol is a natural form of sugar usually derived from starch and is the main content in the new version of sugar free chocolate. Maltitol is in a stable form and melts fast enabling it to be used to make delicious sugar-free chocolates.
Now, anyone can enjoy chocolates without feeling guilty about sugar intakes or calories. If you can give someone a wonderful taste treat while keeping out the sugar that diabetics and others can’t have, it’s a sure hit! There’s no other way of showing someone you love how you feel other than giving them a wonderful box of gourmet sugar free chocolates.
Want to find out more about Gourmet Chocolate, then visit Charlotte Andrews’s site on how to choose the best Sugar Free Chocolate for your needs.
Filed under Negative Calorie Foods, Snack by on Jan 15th, 2010. Comment.
Mexican cuisine makes most of us think of assertive spices; mostly chilies and cumin. This combination of spices is one, which is a perfect representative of the country’s culinary history; an ingredient, which came from the old world with the Spanish and one, which has been a central part of Mexican food for thousands of years.
Chilies are the Mexican spices with the longest history, having been used by the Aztecs for many centuries before the arrival of Europeans. Like tomatoes and potatoes, peppers are new world natives and remain one of the most important ingredients in Mexican recipes just as they always have been.
A familiar type of pepper to Americans is the jalapeno; these small to medium sized hot peppers are a common ingredient in salsas, where they lend their characteristic kick to these sauces. They are also commonly pickled on their own or as part of an escabeche (which is somewhat similar to a Mexican take on Italian giardinera). The Serrano pepper, a smaller and usually slightly hotter pepper is also seen fairly often in US markets. It is hard to imagine Mexican cuisine or Mexican food without the presence of these peppers, as well as others, which are often dried, and ground, as are anchos and pasilla peppers. You will also find peppers smoked to provide a milder, smoky heat as with the smoked jalapenos known as chipotle peppers.
Some of the Mexican culinary herbs, which are native to the country, include epazote, culantro, and Mexican oregano, all of which are very important to various Mexican recipes. Used very often in Mexican and Caribbean cooking, culantro is largely unknown in the US and hard to find other than in Mexican groceries. Its flavor, however, is similar enough to cilantro that this herb may be substituted if you cannot find the real thing in your area.
Despite its name, Mexican oregano is not even a relative of the old world herb of the same name. While their flavors are similar enough that Greek oregano can be substituted if needed, this herb is actually related to lemon verbena, not oregano. Its flavor is slightly stronger than that of the oregano used in Greek and Italian cooking and can be found dried in Mexican groceries and specialty spice markets.
Epazote, on the other hand, is an herb for which there is no real substitute. This herb is used to flavor beans in traditional Mexican recipes. While its flavor is something like that of tarragon, it is not recommended to substitute this or any other herb in a Mexican recipe, which calls for epazote. It has a flavor which is all its own.
Cumin is one of the spices, which we think of the most in connection to Mexican food. This spice is also a staple of Turkish and other Mediterranean cuisines; introduced to Mexico by the Spanish (who themselves were introduced to it by Arabs during the Moorish period in Spain), this ingredient was adopted by Mexican cooks with enthusiasm. This newcomer quickly became an important ingredient in a great many Mexican dishes.
You might say that Mexican food is among the world’s first fusion cuisines, with its blending of old world and new world flavors. Using ingredients from both Europe and the Americas, Mexican cooks created something unique, new and distinctively Mexican. It is a cuisine which has a flavor all its own and thanks in part to Mexican spices, it has become popular in nearly every part of the world.
Mexican food has quite a history and many delicious dishes to experiment with. Visit MexicanFoodRecipes.org for resources, tasty recipes like Mexican rice recipe and handy tips for trying your hand at this delicious cuisine.
Filed under Negative Calorie Foods by on Dec 12th, 2009. Comment.
