Spinach Pasta

It seemed like such a long time since my last food experiment, but it's kind of hard to cook when Bonnie our puppy and kids (not mine) follow me around. Last night I tried to make spinach pasta using the recipe from Jacques Pepin's The Complete Techniques. First part was boiling the spinach. I really should have taken out the hard stalks right in the beginning, but I forgot local spinach has very fibrous stalks so I ended up removing the bits after boiling the veggie. I squeezed the boiled spinach dry and chopped it up. Next part was making the dough. I ended up using a lot more flour (semolina/high gluten mix) than the recipe called for because the dough was so wet (that's what happens when I live in a tropical island). My well of flour leaked so I got eggs and oil all over the place, but I recovered from that. After letting the dough rest, our cook took over because she's the noodle expert in the house. We had the dough cut into fetuccini size, but the pasta was too thick. The cook said that if it was thinner, then the noodles would stick to each other.

In the end, the noodle didn't turn out as well as I liked. It looked like green, home-made udon than pasta. The noodles were too chewy. I think the problem is two-folds. Maybe I should have used another flour combination (semolina/high gluten/all purpose). Also, the noodles really should have been thinner (flatter) or make it small like angel hair. Oh well, at least the taste was good. Food for thought.

For the sauce again I used Pepin's recipe for bachmael sauce. The sauce turned out much better than my previous attempt. I made a flour and butter mixture which is then whisked into boiling milk. After the sauce thickened, salt, pepper, and nutmeg were added for flavoring. The sauce tasted great and had no lumps. Thank goodness at least one recipe worked.