Noodles/Pasta

Many fellow food bloggers are always so prepared for a big event like this, and they have an appropriate post ready first thing in the morning.

Me?

Well, I’m always a bit late.

This time, however, I started thinking about what to make for Fourth of July about a week ago, but I just couldn’t decide.

This morning, when I almost gave up, this idea came to me.

Red-White-Blue pasta.

The red color reflects powdered freeze-dried raspberries, and the blue reflects powdered freeze-dried blueberries.

Have a great 4th everyone!

I like fruit, and I mostly eat them fresh.

But since we are a small household (of two), the smallest sized package is often still too big for us to finish quickly.

So I’m always trying to find a way to use them.

I know it’s easier to use it for sweets, but we can’t consume too many sweets (well, technically we can, but we try not to!), so when I come up with a non-sweet thing I can use fruit for, I go for it.

I followed my mother-in-law’s advice for choosing the right strawberries at a store (she says they have to smell like strawberries), and I got a good batch, but they were also very ripe.

I’ve been really enjoying making homemade pasta lately, and this one turned out to be a fun project, too.

Very easy to handle.

And the pink color!

Can you see the seeds?

The light pink color stayed in the pasta after cooking, which made me happy.

Believe it or not, it does have a wonderful strawberry taste!

And as always, I love the texture of homemade pasta.

It’s just so good.

I coated freshly cooked strawberry pasta with olive oil and homemade herbed feta cheese, added salt and pepper, and then served with garlic balsamic glaze and fresh basil.

This turned out to be a unique sophisticated pasta dish.

I loved it.

This was something I had wanted to try for a while, and I thought this long weekend would be perfect to do so.

Homemade pasta!

I have made homemade pasta using eggs in the past, but this time my goal was to make tasty pasta without using eggs.

I did some research and studied several different eggless pasta recipes.

Well, eggless pasta is very simple.

Basically flour, salt (or no salt), water, and olive oil (or not).

It sounds okay, but I also wanted to come up with an idea where I could add some richness that is found in egg pasta.

Since I use garbanzo flour a lot for my “egg” dishes, I decided to add some garbanzo flour to my dough.

I used to have a pasta machine, but when I looked for it, I couldn’t find it!!

So I decided to do the whole process by hand.

The dough was very easy to handle, and it was actually a lot of fun.

The pasta turned out wonderful!

Love the taste and texture, both.

And the look.

I wanted to serve it very simply because I wanted to showcase the pasta itself.

I cooked garlic in olive oil first, added freshly cooked pasta, sprinkled crushed red pepper and chopped Italian parsley, and then added some butter at the end.

SCRUMPTIOUS!

Whenever I make pasta, I ask myself why I don’t do this more often.

Homemade Pasta – makes four servings

1.5 cup all purpose flour
0.5 cup garbanzo bean flour
a pinch of salt
0.5 cup warm water (to begin with, but I usually add some more)

1. Mix all together. Knead for about 10 minutes. Make a ball. Cover and let it rest for about 15 minutes. Flatten and cut.
2. Cook in boiling water for about 3 minutes.