Homemade Pasta

A batch of angel hair drying out on our desk.

My father-in-law refused to eat pasta in restaurants — “I won’t pay $10 for a plate of noodles,” he once famously said.

I disagree: pasta is one of my favorite foods. Whether it’s Italian, Japanese, or simply some macaroni – I never met a noodle I didn’t like.

Lately I’ve been making my own – if you have a pasta machine it’s easy. If you don’t, you can make plenty of simple pastas (like linguine) with a rolling pin and a knife.

The trick is to use  semolina flour (sometimes called durum, although durum is actually the type of wheat grain used to grind semolina). You can often find it in groceries, or try your local bulk food place. We’re lucky enough to have a place nearby that was willing to stock it for me. Make sure that your semolina is actually made from durum wheat.

Many pasta recipes on the web will tell you to use eggs, but with semolina you don’t need them. Store-bought pasta doesn’t contain eggs. The advantage of this is that you can then dry your pasta out and store it at room temperatures without worrying about food-borne illness.

I added my basic dough recipe to Foodista, my go-to website for recipes.

Rolling Out the Pasta: If you are lucky enough to have a pasta roller like our Atlas, you can use it to roll out sheets of dough. If you are working by yourself, try running very small amounts of dough through at a time, it’s easier to work with shorter sheets if you don’t have a helper to hold onto the long sheets of pasta as they come out of the roller.

1. Start on the widest setting (1 on my machine) and run your doughball through.
2. Repeat over and over, decreasing the size setting on each turn. Don’t skip any!
3. I usually stop at about 6 or 7 on my machine, which yields a pretty thin dough.
4. If you get holes, try doubling the sheet over again and running it through one more time on the same setting.
5. Let your sheets dry about 15 minutes or so.
6. If you are making angel hair or linguine, run the sheets of pasta through the cutting attachment.

Pro Tip: Dust your pasta sheets with semolina flour every few turns and you’ll find that it goes through the machine much more smoothly. Also dust the sheets a bit before running them through the cutter, and you’ll find that the pasta cuts more cleanly and doesn’t stick to itself nearly as badly.

Using a Rolling Pin: You don’t need a fancy machine to make good pasta, if you have a rolling pin and a little elbow grease. Take a little dough and roll it out on a floured surface with a rolling pin. Get it as thin as you possibly can without tearing, and use a knife to cut it into shapes.

Drying the Pasta: You can lay your pasta out on wax paper to dry overnight. Once its hard and brittle, package it up into containers. It should store for quite some time.

Making Ravioli: I don’t have a ravioli attachment for my machine. Instead, I use a small mini-muffin pan to form my ravioli shapes. Here’s the trick:

1. Lay a sheet of pasta over the muffin pan. Press the dough slightly into the pan, but not all the way. You should get some circular indentations, but you aren’t trying to form the pasta to the inside of the muffin cups. You’re just making some room for the filling.
2. Spoon your filling into the indentations.
3. Brush the exposed parts of the pasta sheet with water to help the ravioli glue itself together.
4. Lay a second sheet over the top of everything, and use your fingers to press it down firmly.
5. With a quick movement, flip the pan over onto a dry, floured surface.
6. Use a knife to cut out your individual ravioli.

Most ravioli fillings can’t be dried, but they’ll freeze really well.

Finished linguine that has been dried and packed for storage.

Garden Journal

Temps remained pretty stable on top of light box – in the low 70s which is good enough. If I needed it slightly warmer I could probably drill a few holes in the top of the box to let more heat through… but I think I’ll leave it alone for now. As it is, I think I’ve tweaked down a decent system for when it’s time to start seeds in earnest (in a few weeks).

Restarted the cooked herbs yesterday and added some rosemary and sage that I’d been meaning to throw into the mix.

Since my old grow-light setup heated things up too much, I’ve replaced them with a pair of 3 foot strip lights from Lowes. They were inexpensive – like $12 each. They needed a standard outlet cord added to them, since they are mostly meant to be wired as permanent fixtures, but that was easy. I hacked up a couple old extension cords to them.

They fit perfectly on the left side of my potting stand, and are hung on a chain so they can be lowered and raised when I begin moving starts under them.

All in all – it looks like a mad scientists lab down there now!

I repurposed an old trough from the barn to make this stand. The reflective material is metallic insulation that I had around from an old project.

Detail of the hanging strip light arrangement. These were cheap, bright, and fit perfectly into my stand.

Garden Journal

New strategy!

Keeping temps right under those grow lights was just too touchy. Things cooked when they were on, and got too cold whenever they were off.

Built myself a light box – a wooden box with a lightbulb in it that heats the starts from the bottom when you set them on top of it. Had enough scrap wood and an old porcelain light receptacle to tack it together in just a few minutes.

Now our starts have a two stage process: 1. Start on warm light box. 2. Transfer starts to under lights after sprouts show.

Still monitoring temps overnight. Will pot a new set of starts if they remain stable.

Build from scraps and a leftover porcelain receptacle. The bulb provides heat from beneath the starts. I prop a piece of scrap over the front to trap in more heat.

Garden Journal

Had 3 reflector grow lights going… basil sprouts cooked and died.

Leaving as-is and taking some temp readings. When we pulled off plastic, pots were visibly steamy in our cold (mid 50s) basement.

Lights were approx. 1 foot from pots – temps got above 90! Will try to adjust temps down over the evening into the 70s by repositioning lights, and maybe replacing one or two with a standard CFL instead of those hot grow lamps. Will also start a timer (try to setup a dark cycle that stays above 55).

Garden Journal

Started some herbs in pots (various old plastic and styrofoam containers of about half pint) under lights in the basement. Added reflective material to my potting stand because I had trouble with getting enough light to my starts last year. Did all this on Jan. 13 (two days ago). Started: basil, cilantro, dill, parsley, thyme, chives, oregano. Used leftover seed from last year, hope it’s still good!

Testing a new watering method – using 1 quart jars filled with water and strips of cotton to “wick” water into pots. Works well, but maybe too well. One or two pots are swimming. Waiting to see if they dry out under lights when I remove the saran wrap from the pots.

Basil has already sprouted!

This is mostly an experiment for this new watering method. If it works, we’ll pot the herbs. If not – oh well it’s still early.

Might play with tweaking the size/material of wick to decrease the amount of water delivered. Testing with parachute cord on one.

Meet Mugsy

Mugsy showed up in the backyard one day, about a month ago. There are a half dozen cats who show up in the yard from time to time; most of them live in the cow barn down the street. Most of them don’t like to be petted, spoken to, or pursued in any way, thank you very much.

Mugsy, however, came limping right up when I called him. He was extremely hungry and was more than happy to devour a plate full of Purina Cat Chow. He was also willing to be petted, right off the bat. You might even say he was needy. Desparate.

We fed Mugsy and gave him a week or so to return home, if he had one. He didn’t seem to have one though. He had earmites and worms and a number of wounds from fighting, and he hadn’t been neutered. We surrounded an old doghouse with hay bales and he agreed to sleep there.

It should be noted that before Mugsy had a name, we called him “Cat Cat”. He has one of those nicks in his ear that fighting tomcats often have. Here’s a blurry photo of it, because Mugsy doesn’t sit still and prefers head-butting to being photographed.

Mugsy's Ear

When we met him, Mugsy also had a puncture wound near his ear and these two scrapes on his back legs upon which there was no fur:

Scrapes and Scratches

These looked way worse a few weeks ago and were part of the impetous of getting him to the vet. When we got there, though, the vet said these scratches weren’t so bad. It was the hidden bite on his front leg, the one that was making him limp, that was abscessed and nasty.

So the vet gave him another bald spot:

A Bald Leg.

Since Mugsy was already going under anesthetic so the vet could drain his abscess, it was good time to get him neutered as well.

Fourth bald spot acquired.

The Bald Backside.

Sorry.

Mugsy also got antibiotics, Mita-Clear, de-wormer, and all his vaccines.

He looks like hell, though, for a cat so well taken care of. A photo of all his scrapes and scratches in one frame is in order, but he won’t sit still for it.

Whether he comes inside or remains an outdoor cat remains to be seen. We have a number of things to consider: the fact that he wants in, the fact that our other cat Does Not want him in, the Country Mouse’s allergy to him, the need for booster shots, the possibility that he still marks his territory, and the fact that someday we’ll want outdoor cats to chase away barn mice. He’s so comfortable at our home and wants in so badly that we theorize that he actually lived in our house long ago, before it sat abandoned for a couple of years and we came along and bought it last Spring.

We still call him Cat Cat sometimes out of habit. He’s super sweet and gracefully endures the application of ear mite medicine and other indignities. He likes to follow us around the yard and he loves to be held and carried. One day I went out and got into my car, and he followed me and jumped in before I could shut the door. We love him.

A Great Big Wagon

I cannot overstate the importance of having a large wagon if you have any land at all.

Our wagon (technically a “garden cart“) is hardly the red wagon I had as a kid. We bought it to help clear the Huge Pile of Trash from the old barn, and it has already been a big help cleaning up the fallen limbs from around the yard. And although three acres isn’t massive for a homestead, one gets tired of carrying piles of stuff back and forth. This wagon makes that easy, and even kind of fun. I know people (even some neighbors) who use fancy ATVs with cargo beds for lugging almost anything around their yard, but that seems like overkill for our little homestead.

The sides of the wagon can be lowered for handling large or unwieldy loads.

Our wagon is large – large enough that a couple of adults could sit cross-legged inside it. It has heavy duty, inflatable tires, and sits high enough to handle most reasonable terrain. The draw bar can be be attached to our tractor hitch. The bed is made of heavy-gauge aluminum mesh, and the sides are hinged so that they can be lowered (for carrying larger items. One of these days I’m going to rig up an adjustible wooden brace so that the sides will lay flat to make one very large bed.

In Search of a Place to Sit

The fact that patio chairs started at a hundred dollars each, everywhere I looked, wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d actually liked any of them. Instead they were all boxy with factory-distressed hunter green frames and discount mustard-yellow fake brocade on the seats, plastic umbrella table optional.

But every time there was a strong wind, which was about twice a day, our little canvas camping chairs blew right off the deck and beyond into the tall, tangled grass (the Country Mouse does his best to keep up with mowing the three acres). Sitting on our porch and staring at the cows had to be preceded by a trek around the lawn, looking for the chairs.

So I started scouring the junk shops, and I found this nifty set of wrought-iron chairs for $25. They were begging for a little TLC and they promised to stay put.

The chairs, before

I knew right away that I wanted to paint them red, but wasn’t sure what to do with the seats. Then we stopped by a fabric outlet store on our way home from Myrtle Beach, where I found this lovely retro strawberry vinyl and enough foam to freshen them up.

Strawberry fields

My front porch is like an ice cream parlor now. Pardon me while I go and make a caramel sundae.

The chairs, all finished!

Simple Tools

Well, it was supposed to be an "arty" photo...

I am not immune to the pleasures of browsing catalogs and magazines full of ads for shiny and impractical tools. Huge tractors with air conditioned cabs, automatic log splitters, dremel sets, etc.

Obviously, this is one area where I have a real danger of slipping into a consumerist mentality and throw money at a task rather than roll up my sleeves and make do with what I have.

This is a disease that infects homeowners in general, and homesteaders in particular. Sometimes you really do need a certain tool. And it’s so often a tool that you would never have imagined needing – back when the building superintendent took care of things. After you’ve experienced the joy of really having the right tool to get a job done, you begin to think of every new job in terms of what tool you need to really do it right this time.

Walk into a Lowes (or the big-box hardware store of your choice), and you will see an incredible (some might say ridiculous) diversity of hand and power tools. The variety of cordless drills alone: in different sizes, colors, materials, and optional attachments will boggle your mind. Hand tools of every description, and some that defy it.

Perhaps someday I will need a rockery trowel. When that day comes, I know that Lowes will be there for me.

Over time, my favorite tools have always been simple tools that can do many things. Since moving onto the homestead, I’ve acquired a few more favorites. With one notable exception (our little garden tractor) most of them are hand tools that don’t require power. All are tools that can be used for many different job – this is key. I hate having something that I only use once a year. Or once a decade.

In the next post, the first of my favorites: A Great Big Wagon

After the winds came…

The insurance company doesn’t like our moldering outbuildings – so we dismantled one and much of the other this past weekend with the help of friends and family.

And then the winds scattered our neat stacks of old wood and metal over the soybean field behind our yard. These were special winds, the remnants of hurricane Ike or so I’m told. They reached somewhere between 70 and 80mph, and were quite sustained. We sat and watched the trees bend, and prayed that our house would remain undamaged.

Goodbye Old Shed! We hardly knew ye!

It was quite beautiful, but it shut off the lights for a few days. We got lucky, our power came back on Tuesday. I hear that many people might not have any power until next week. We lost a fridge full of food, a little bit of siding got pulled out of place, and that’s about it. It could have been worse: the ancient beech trees in our front yard are still standing, and there was no major damage at all.

We’re considering a generator of some kind, but since this was a freak weather event we aren’t making a priority out of it. In the meantime, there are downed trees to cleanup, lumber piles to sort, old junk to salvage, and trash to truck to the landfill.

Barn Deconstruction - in medias res

Our barn (like many ancient barns) came complete with a huge pile of trash from the previous residents, much of it very dangerous looking. I hate to contribute much to the size of a landfill, but I simply don’t want a backyard that looks like a warzone.

We are salvaging a lot of great lumber from the old barn. I easily have enough to build a new shed for the lawnmower, and maybe even enough for the carport.

A poignant moment: humankind has always been both builder and destroyer.

Unexpected bonus: All these fallen branches everywhere mean we get to have a big bonfire almost every night!