Rosemary & beets

Yesterday my brother and I made pasta. We used the recipe from the pasta machine, which is 500 grams of flour and 4 eggs. Since we had some beets, my brother had the idea to make the pasta beet-colored. We weren't sure the best way of getting the beet color into the dough. We ended up food processing some and kneading it into the dough, which wasn't perfect since it left little piece of beet that made a whole in the dough when we tried to roll it really thin. We also added food processed rosemary. My general rule of thumb for using herbs and spices is that you can never have too much. I grabbed a veritable branch from our rosemary bush and chopped it up. It looked like a huge amount, but it gave a nice hint of flavor that wasn't at all overpowering.

Max rolling the pasta

Word of warning: do not do this. Just because there is flour does not mean that the pieces won't stick. Next time we will use layers of wax paper.

The bottom layers stuck together. We actually cooked it just like that because we couldn't figure out what else to do with it and it turned out fine; you couldn't really tell. The pasta cooks in about 3 minutes because it's fresh.The finished product. We used a sage butter sauce, which is literally just sage leaves and butter sautéed. There were also sautéed shittake mushrooms.These are the beets. I have had beets in many shapes and forms and this is the best way to cook them in my opinion. It's really simple too. All you do is cut them up and bake them with salt and a little olive oil until they are soft when you stick a fork in. I added some of the extra rosemary too. If you cut them sort of thin they carmelize a little and it is delicious.