I have been known to eat a lot of things raw that you shouldn’t necessarily eat raw.  Cookie dough, well, given.  Bread dough?  Check.  Pie dough?  Definitely– in fact, my mom always saves the scraps from her pies for me to eat.  And possibly my favorite?  Uncooked, fresh pasta.  Mmmmmmmm.  Do you love to eat anything raw?

For Christmas, I got what I asked for: the new Kitchen Aid pasta maker attachment.  Let me tell you, it is completely worth it.  Fabulous.  I used it for the first time last night, and the results were remarkably delicious.  And easy!

I started with a simple egg pasta recipe, as the instruction book recommends.  Here’s the super easy part: you use your mixer to make the dough, and then the attachment to extrude it!  The dough hook even kneads it for you!  And the dough turned out absolutely perfectly.

straight out of the electric mixer

After you make the dough, which honestly took about 7 minutes, you break it into “walnut-sized pieces” to feed it into the extruder.  It’s been a while since I’ve held an unshelled walnut, so I did my best.

ready for extrusion

Then all you do is feed it into the tube, and out comes amazing pasta!  I decided to make the bucatini, because who doesn’t like a slightly more unusual pasta?

someone's going to think one of these photos is obscene, I know it

The only glitch was that I didn’t follow the directions post-extrusion, so I didn’t separate the strands immediately.  So I had a few that stuck together.  But it was super yummy.

Needless to say, there were quite a few strands that didn’t make it to the pot.  I ate them raw first.

I’m going to try whole wheat pasta tonight with shrimp, the 6 year old’s favorite.  Maybe rotini?

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