Nesting

I was already planning to have a quiet weekend, but the passing of my furry nephew, Strider, made me want to hang out with my own furry boys more than ever. I've been working late and when I wasn't doing that, I've been hanging out with friends and family. They have each other to keep company, but I'm sure they miss me when I'm gone. So, this has been a nesting weekend.

Above is a picture of what I've been doing all day... making pasta. Yesterday evening, I made a couple batches of plain egg pasta. Some fat and short noodles for addition to chicken soup and some thinner linguine to boil up and have with some tomato sauce or butter and Parmesan.
Today, I had a brilliant idea... one of the pasta recipes I've tried recently had olive oil in it, and the final product tasted of olive oil. (Mmmmmm!) What if I added rosemary? I made some and cooked it up and I was right, it was delicious. (The ratio for that one is 300 g flour, 3 eggs, 30 g olive oil, salt to taste, and 1 T. dried rosemary, ground with a pestle to break down the size a bit.) I made up a batch to freeze for my sister:




Then, because I wanted it to be a proper gift and because I'd been thinking of trying it, I made fresh saffron pasta. I found the recipe here, but I think I used half as much saffron as they have. That makes the recipe: 1 t. saffron threads (I ground them a little, in order to have bits of saffron spread throughout), 1 T. hot water, steeped for 10 min., 2 c. flour, 2 eggs. I also added a bit more water in the long run, probably because I live in such a dry climate. It turned out beautifully.








(Yes, that is a chair I'm drying the pasta on.)

And the lovely photo at the top is the completed saffron pasta.

The other thing I tried out was mixing the dough on the table, instead of a bowl. It was really neat! It worked better than the bowl and was more fun. :D