What, will these hands ne'er be clean?

A couple of weeks ago, Grammy sent me her hand-cranked pasta machine. Though it is time consuming, I've been looking for any old excuse and expanse of hours to play around with pasta dough. Valentines Day, a centuries old celebration of Catholic martyrs and all things pink and red, seemed the perfect occasion for a kitchen massacre--Beet Red Pasta.

Some folks don't like to cook with beets, and it is easy to understand why. The vibrant red hue that makes a beet so delectable is the very same substance that will stain a cook's clothes, hands, countertops and pans. For every minute that you spend preparing a red beet, you might spend another scrubbing out bright pink spots. I often stick to preparing Golden or Candy varieties when it is time for beets. But for coloring pasta, only true red would do.

I began by making a beet puree. Putting a small saucepan on the stove to boil, I trimmed the remnants of the beet greens from the roots and gave them a good hard scrub. Then I tossed the beets in for a 10 minute boil, then carefully without scalding anybody, slipped them from their skins and cut them in half. (You can also roast them in the oven, but I wanted to reserve the red cooking liquid for boiling my pasta later on.) From there, I was just a teaspoon of olive oil and a few pulses of the food processor away from my puree, which I set aside to cool while I began making my dough.

When I make pasta (I've done this twice, so this sounds somewhat disingenuous), I start with a big bowl in which I mix together 3 cups of Unbleached All Purpose Flour and 3/4 teaspoon of Salt. Then I make a well in the center of the Flour, crack in three whole Eggs and pour in 3 tablespoons of my best tasting Olive Oil. I was surprised to learn that you don't need fancy flour to get started making pasta. You do need to make sure that your bare bones components taste good, because as you'll see, there's not much but olive oil and salt to fall back on in terms of flavor.

THIS is where things got a little "Double, double toil and trouble." It didn't help that I'd watched Polanski's film rendering of The Scottish Play just one week before, but seriously, if I wanted Bloody Valentine, I got it. I tossed three tablespoons of the beet puree among the eggs in my flour well, and as I had done before, beat the ingredients in the well together with my bare hands. Seriously, the whole process should have ended with a newt's eyeball or by my spitting in the goo and smearing it on some unfortunate Thane. Luckily for my husband, it didn't.

Working from the inside of the bowl, I incorporated the flour mix with my hands until I had sort of a shaggy ball of dough. At this point, I worked in more beet puree, one tablespoon at a time (using 2-3 max), until the dough came together. Then I turned the ball onto a floured surface, kneaded the dough for ten minutes, and then left the ball to rest beneath the big bowl while I made a short-lived attempt to clean up after the carnage. The beet juice spots multiplied before my eyes, so for sake of my sanity, I gave up on mopping and strapped the pasta machine to the countertop.

Now as I've mentioned, I'm pretty new to using a pasta machine. It is a lot like a play-doh fun factory--one that is actually intended for edible ends. I have yet to use the cutting attachments without gumming up the machine royally, so for now I stick to just using the rollers and cutting my sheets by hand into something like Fettucine or Pappardelle. This way, the noodles look fair enough and have that nice handcrafted thing going. Because I was going to cook my pasta right away, and because I didn't want my house to look any more like Dunsinane than it already did, I opted out of hanging the noodles to dry. I just tossed the cut pieces in a touch of flour and laid them onto a sheet of wax paper. I could have spread them flat or made nests I suppose.

Next, I put my reserved beet water into a large stockpot, topping the pot off with water from the tap. I added plenty of salt to the pot, and brought the water to a boil. Meanwhile, I decided to roast up some Chioggia "Candy" Beets, to have on the side. (I promised my husband that I wouldn't make him eat beets for a while.)

With the Chioggias in the oven, I made my sauce for the pasta. Many folks like to serve a cream sauce with their beet pastas. I opted to make spicy sauce using the leafy beet tops, diced tomatoes, garlic, onion, crushed red pepper and a touch of vermouth. I threw in what was left of the beet puree for good measure, and I ended up with a sauce that would make Technicolor nervous.

Once my red water came to a rolling boil, I raked through the noodles to unstick them a bit, and dropped them into the water to boil for 6 minutes. I knew from what I read that the pasta color was going to fade upon boiling from magenta to something more along the lines of, say, salmon. *Sniff* What came out of the pot actually had a variegated quality--marbled like strips of bacon. It seemed unnatural to say the very least, like purple ketchup or blue raspberry. But every bit of color, from the stripes of the candy beets to the red ribs of the greens, came from one vegetable. (Oh, sure Katie, one magical, delicious vegetable.) Happy Valentines Day to mine, you and yours.