Pasta Puttanesca with Theron's Homemade Egg Pasta!

Greeting, friends!

It's definitely been longer than I'd intended between blog posts, and that's my bad!  Sorry!

Theron and I have been rather busy traveling to Chicago and Texas for the holidays, getting over being sick, and then celebrating Christmas and New Years Eve with our friend Leigh who I hadn't seen in seven months!

Belated-Christmas and on-time New Years Eve with Leigh

Home-made Pasta Puttanesca!

To the right, you can see the delicious pasta puttanesca we made this weekend.  By we, I really mean Theron. It was his at-home date for me, but more on that later.

For Christmas I got him pasta attachments for his kitchen-aid mixer, and all Saturday evening he was literally just like a little kid playing with a new toy!

It was fun to see him so happy, and happy to see the results turn out so well!  This is an amazing dish, and you certainly don't have to make the pasta yourselves!  But since we did, let's start with that!

If you want to skip the pasta and go straight to the sauce (you'll be skipping some cute pix of my hubby!) click here.


The Pasta

We made a simple egg-pasta recipe that came in the manual for the kitchen aid attachments.
You start with four large eggs.

Add in one tablespoon of water.  We found later we had to add more.

Then you need 3 1/4 cups all purpose flour.

Sifted :)

Mix your mixture first with the flat beater at speed 2 for 30 seconds.

Then we switched to the dough hook, and it was clear we needed to add more water.

More water added, it began to look like dough! :)

You're supposed to leave the speed at 2 and let this do it's thing for 2 minutes.

Then you hand-knead the dough for two more minutes.

He loves all of this, if you can't tell!

 

This is how Theron has fun :)

Then we set it aside for 20 minutes.

After that, Theron took it out and kneaded it again for a bit.

And cut it into quarters, ready to feed into the pasta sheet roller.

 

My attempt at an artsy shot ;)

 

Happiness is feeding pasta through the sheet-machine for the first time!

 

Crazy stuff, eh?

But oh-so fun!

"How long is this gonna get!?"

New attachment - time to make spaghetti!

 

My mom, having seen some of these pix, decided it takes long arms to use this ;D

 

Brigly waits patiently for the final product ;)

Looking good!

I'm doing it! I'm making pasta! hahah ;)

One of my fave pix of the whole night - he checked to make sure it was coming out right!

Then, clearly, it was time to play! 

And we put this in the fridge while we worked on the sauce for the pasta!

 

But only after proudly gloating...

And being quite silly!

Now up, the:

Puttanesca Sauce

Start by chopping your ingredients. 

Minced garlic will be the first thing to go into your pan.
We used three cloves.

Then you need about a third cup of flat Italian parsley, chopped well.

Theron's the best chopper!

Meanwhile, I grated loads of Parmesan cheese!

You also need to chop a tablespoon of fresh oregano leaves (bottom right) 

and 3/4 cup fresh arugula.

Arugula, you are so beautiful, to meeee!

You go, Mr. Chopper!

You can certainly buy pre-sliced olives, but Theron wanted to do it himself.

You will need 1/4 cup of sliced olives.

Meanwhile, we also chopped up some chicken.

And started cooking it in it's own pan.

In you go!

For the sauce, we coated our pan with a little more than a table spoon of olive oil ;)

And sauteed our garlic till 'fragrant.'

Our chicken cooked up nicely.

Then I put approximately two tsps of salt into the water that was boiling for our spaghetti.

Are you ready for this?

In you go!

This is to boil for approx 2-5 minutes, but use your judgement and get it to the texture you prefer.
I am pretty sure we over-did ours!

Then we added all our greens to our sauce pan once the garlic was ready.

Next up went our olives...

And a small amount of crushed red pepper to start.

Two tablespoons of capers.

Tell me that's not beautiful?

This should saute for about 2 minutes.

Meanwhile, Theron's spaghetti looks pretty done!

The recipe called for just one can of non-salted diced tomatoes...

But I added two for more sauciness, and some more crushed red pepper as well!

Gorgeous!

Just plain beautiful, am I right?

Love this pic of Theron!! 

Goofy proud puppy!

Heck yeah! Look at my home-made noodles!

Er almost ;D

I approve!! Though somehow look frightened ;)

By the way, this was to cook for about 5 more minutes.

We then added our chicken to it.

I wanted to get the flavor of the sauce just right and thus cooked the chicken separate.

Time to plate it up!

Fantastically delicious pasta Puttanesca!

With Parmesan, of course!

Sometimes love hurts ;)

But is oh-so-rewarding!

Thanks for doing all the work, babe!

This was Theron's version of giving me a stay-in date-night.

He wanted to make everything for me, so I got to sit and watch, 

and occasionally dance around and sing!
(To 80's music, of course!)

 

Don't you worry!

Mr. Brigly bear, for all his cuteness and patience, got a bowl of chicken, cheese, and some noodles.

He was a happy boy.

Recipe

Egg Pasta :

4 large eggs
1 Tbs water (or more)
31/2 cup sifted, all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt

'Place eggs, water, flour, and salt in mixer bowl. Attach flat beater, turn to speed 2 and mix for 30 seconds. Exchange flat beater for dough hook. Turn to speed 2 and knead for 2 minutes.  Remove dough from bowl, and hand-knead for 2 minutes.  Let dough rest 20 minutes.  Divide dough into four pieces before processing with pasta sheet roller attachment"

We over-cooked our pasta. The manual says you should add 2 tsp of salt to water, bring it to a boil, and cook until firm - approx 2-5 minutes for fresh pasta.

Recipe

Puttanesca sauce:

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
1/4 cup pitted chopped Spanish or Greek olives
2 tablespoons capers
1 tablespoon fresh oregano leaves or 1 teaspoon dried
1-2 tablespoons crushed red pepper flakes
2 cans diced tomatoes, preferably "no salt added"
3/4 cup chopped fresh arugula
1/4 cup grated Parmesan

Saute garlic in olive oil for 1 minute or until it is fragrant.
Add in all your greens, olives, crushed red pepper, and capers and saute another 2 minutes or so.

Add in 2 cans diced tomatoes, no salt added, and let cook for about five minutes.

Optional: We then added cooked-chicken to this.  You can also add seafood (shrimp, etc) or whatever you like. It's delicious!