Homemade Pasta with Prosciutto and Peas

Well, things have been pretty quiet on here lately due to crazy work deadlines and the beginning of a long stretch of travel. But, we promise to keep blogging dutifully and to bring you some goodies!

Sometimes you have those days where all you want is a big plate of pasta to fill your belly. We had one of those days last week. To take a break from work, we decided to make the meal fully collaborative by making the whole thing from scratch. We discussed the project for a while, and ultimately decided on making a light, cream-based sauce rather than a tomato-based dish, to focus on theflavor of the pasta.

Pasta!
Mark threw together some dough using a simple pasta recipe (we like Jamie Oliver's; it's really easy, and how can you pass up a recipe in which the chef says "just bung everything in"?). We used wholewheat flour, which gave the pasta a little bit more texture but was still really tasty--pasta with a bite. Then we got to clamping the pasta roller on to the kitchen counter and cranking away to make thin, gorgeously yellow sheets of pasta. Then, through the cutting roller for gorgeously yellow ribbons. (It's totally possible, if you are very coordinated and neat, to do this on your own... for us, four hands were needed at times to help feed the pasta through and hang them up without breaking.)
Sauce!
While we were at the grocery store, we stopped by the deli case (right in front of the prosciutto and parma ham, my favorite spot) to try to think about what kind of italian meat would go well with our sauce. Ideally, prosciutto would be great -- but our wallets just aren't deep enough for the $23/lb prosciutto they have on display. Thank the food gods for the sign that said, Ask us about proscuitto ends - perfect for soups and salads! Ask we did, and we ended up with a really great, meaty chunk of a prosciutto butt to take home for only about $5 - way better than the thin, pre-sliced sheets you find in plastic packaging, and way cheaper than the fresh-sliced pieces at the counter.

Anyway, excitement over prosciutto aside, we sliced up some onion and garlic, then sauteed those in butter. When those were soft, the meat (cut into small cubes) went in, and then a small container of cream, and about 5-6 oz of grated fontina. You could use any sort of italian cheese for this sauce, but we chose fontina because it had more flavor than parmesan. When that was all melted, we added a big handful of thawed, frozen peas (we had to be lazy in some way!), let it simmer, and that was that.

The pasta, because it's fresh, only boils for a few minutes. With the cream sauce and the light flavor of the peas, it was a really easy-going meal but still gave that good feeling of being full. The pasta was smooth, full of flavor, and the sauce was just cheesy enough with great bites of salty prosciutto. This was a great meal to make after our many previous meals of multi-hour braising and baking.


If you have extra pasta left over, like we did, you can leave it out on a counter top overnight (out of reach from pets) and let it dry. (You might want to form them into smaller shapes/ribbons so that they don't snap when you put them in an airtight container.) We made another pasta dish with the same noodles the other day and they tasted just as fresh!