Homemade Noodles

Who knew that making noodles was so easy?  It never looked easy to me... I remember years ago I bought a fancy pasta machine that extruded noodles in any shape.  It looked like a Play-Doh toy and I never really used it.  Back then I did not understand the value of good fresh food to my body.  I don't know where I missed that lesson in nursing school 30 years ago, but I appeared to have done so.  Perhaps it was a lecture during one of the extended lunch breaks I took at the local brew pub... or one of the classes I slept through.  I remember a nutrition class where they taught us that vitamins A, D, E, and K were fat soluble vitamins and you could overdose on them but that is about all the nutrition information I took from formal training so long ago.

It was a few years later, which was also many years ago, that I sold that pasta machine or gave it away, hardly ever touching it.  Oh, what I could do with it now!

Earlier this week I was hungry for beef stroganoff.  Not the kind from a package... the kind that starts with fresh meat, homemade cream of mushroom soup, sour cream, and seasonings... and over a bed of noodles.  Noodles sure seemed intimidating but I considered the stroganoff noodles a trial run for the lasagna noodles I knew I wanted to make soon.

So I googled a recipe for noodles.  Oh my goodness... all that is in them is flour, eggs, and a little salt!  After grinding a few cups of white wheat berries, I turned on the KitchenAid and asked it to produce some noodle dough for me.  And it did.

I really did not like the way it was mixing up so I added a little milk to it.  Perfect and it felt SO CLEAN!!  Like real food should.  Simple and delicious.

I soon realized why noodles were so intimidating.  I had to roll them skinny so I could cut them.  Now that was a workout!!  I was exhausted when I got that first batch of noodles rolled out.. and they were not thin either!  My hands gave out early on and I was leaning my forearms on the rolling pin pushing with my upper body weight.  It seemed as soon as I rolled the dough one way, it sprung back when pressure was let off.

Nevertheless, we ended up with some long fat noodles that night!  The instructions called for boiling them for 15 minutes.  Mine were so fat that I boiled them for about 25 minutes before they were tender.

Just like all the food I have been making from scratch, the beef stroganoff over whole wheat noodles was FANTASTIC!  Nothing can compare to the flavor derived from using fresh ingredients, real butter, whole milk, and whole wheat.

Here is the ingredients to make a batch of noodles:

3 cups flour
4 - 5 eggs
3/4 teaspoon salt
4 - 5 Tablespoons water (or milk)

mix it up, roll it out, cut it up, and boil for 15 minutes.