Making Pasta

As regular readers know, I am highly in favor of making my own food - bread, yogurt, applesauce, all of which I made this weekend, and more. The purpose (to me, at least) of making your own food is to have a final product that you trust, and that tastes better than what you could buy. With pasta, I am coming to the conclusion that for the normal cook (i.e. me), that simply isn't what happens. Benjamin and I made whole wheat fettuccine this weekend, the first time in a long while, and it was just as much trouble as it has always been. Flour gets all over the kitchen, bits of pasta cover the counters and floor, and the pasta sticks together or doesn't get cut properly, or some other, new mini-disaster. The end result isn't that much better than what I get dried at the grocery store, and is certainly not as good as pasta I could buy at an artisanal pasta store. And it takes so much more effort that a simple, quick pasta dish takes hours and makes an enormous mess. This is not to say that I will give up on making pasta forever, but it will probably remain a rare event. Best to stick to bread, I think.