Pancetta, Onion, and Parsley Pasta – Marcella Cucina (Marcella Hazan, p. 170)

Tonight's adventure was courtesy of Mrs. Hazan. We decided to try our hand at homemade pasta to go with a sauce found in Marcella Cucina. This turned out to be a rather epic saga, as it was my first time trying noodles out of the box, and the Midden has only tried it once or twice.

A basic pasta recipe calls for one cup of flour to two eggs. The instructions called for scrambling the eggs inside a flour "bowl", which was precarious from the start and quickly turned into a flour volcano leaking yolky lava.


The dough was extremely sticky – we blame the 90˚ weather here (on Oct. 6th, nonetheless) – so we probably added at least another cup of flour trying to get it dry enough. The Midden separated the dough into six parts while I worked the hand-crank pasta machine.

We initially wanted to go for spaghetti, but the first batch through was sticky and clumpy. Time for more flour. The Scotsman mentioned going out for Wendy's.

A little more flour, and the dough came through the fettuccini press decently. After that, we were on a roll.

The "sauce" wasn't so much a sauce, but tasty nonetheless. I can't say we followed Mrs. Hazan's recipe too closely either – we used prosciutto instead of pancetta and added garlic to the onions and parsley. We also added a pat of butter because...well, why not?


We tossed it all together. The Scotsman glanced into the skillet.

"This looks...interesting."

Sorry, Marcella.

However, we were again surprised. The recipe called for a lot of onion – four, to be exact – and they gave the pasta a lot of sweetness that was really good, especially when tossed with pecorino romano and served with a side of roasted asparagus. All around, we agreed this recipe (or our variation thereof) was a keeper.