Making pasta is easy and fun; fresh pasta leaves packages stuff for dead. I bought a large bag of spinach last weekend and simply couldn’t use it all, so today (2006-08-20) I salvaged what leaves I could and set out to make some spinach pasta!

Ingredients:

• Pile of Spinach (about 2-3rds cup after cooking)
• Strong Plain Flour (around 1.8 cups I guess)
• 1 large egg
• 1 tsp of salt
• 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1. Boil plenty of water and salt it a little; throw in the spinach for only a few seconds, leave it in too long and all the flavour will end up in the water! When the spinach looks nicely softened scoop out and squeeze out as much water as you can (I use a wooden spoon and a sieve for this). Place the spinach into a food processor (keep the boiling water for boiling pasta later if that is your plan).
2. Put the flour, salt and olive oil into the food processor and process until spinach is completely blended with the flour (see photo on right).

   

3. Drop the egg into the food processor (preferably minus the shell) while on a slow speed – the mixture should fairly quickly start to ball up (if not you may need to add a little more egg from another egg, or water – if too sticky adjust with some more flour).
4. Relocate from food processor onto a floured surface and kneed until dough is evenly blended and nicely elastic.
5. Break dough ball into manageable portions and roll very thin on a floured surface.
6. With a sharp knife cut into fettucini.
7. Put aside for later cooking, if not cooking today you can hang it to dry a little and use it in the near future (you could probably refrigerate or freeze it without drying, but I”m not familiar with doing this).

   

When you want to cook it just treat as you would any other pasta, put into plenty of salted boiling water and drain when it is done!

I threw together a very simple sauce to go with this, just a tin of tomatoes, onion, garlic, green olives, capers and anchovies – done in less than 10 minutes.