Dec. 30: Making Noodles

Making Noodles

One meal we love to have in the winter is homemade noodles, mashed potatoes, and gravy with various meats. Today, I taught the boys how to make noodles so they can make them when they get home if they want. 

First Step: preparing the ingredients.Here, the boys are measuring out the flour. We quadruple the recipe so that we have enough for our big family, so today's lesson included how to multiply fractions. Jer said it would take too long to do it that way, so they opted to just measure everything 4 times. Hilarious! We also had a lesson about how 3 teaspoons equals a tablespoon and that in a recipe, a T is a tablespoon while a t is a teaspoon.  I'm not sure they fully understood these concepts, but Hey- there's always next time!

Jer learned in culinary class to take a knife and go over the top of the measuring cup to make it exact. :)

Step 2: Assign the rest of the kids jobs so we can eat soon! Here, Karley & Kaydey are putting away the dishes & setting table. You can see them working in the background in some of the other pictures.

Jamo & Kayley are in charge of the homemade mashed potatoes. Here they are washing and cutting the potatoes.

Step 2 for Real: Jer is mixing the ingredients while Alex is spreading the surface with flour.

Step 3: Rolling out the dough. The dough can be rolled until it is paper thin. I don't usually have that much patience!

Keep the surface of the dough and the surface of the table covered with flour so the dough doesn't stick. Keep rolling!

Try to keep a rectangular surface, not Florida as shown here. You can easily fix your peninsula if you make one by accident. It's not a big deal, it's just easier to roll and cut if it is more of a rectangle than anything else.

Step 4: Rolling up the dough. Make sure there is plenty of flour on the surface of the dough first. Then roll it up into a log.

Step 5: Cut the dough into thin slices. They will blow up in the boiling water, so don't worry about making them too small.

Alex is unrolling the noodles and adding them to the pot of boiling water. I forgot to take pictures after this- sorry! We were hungry and wanted to eat! We spent the day in Iowa City running errands and got home close to 5, so we were anxious to get dinner on the table.

Step 6: Unroll the slices and add them to boiling water. You might want to break them up a little because the pieces are very long otherwise. They cook up way faster than store-bought noodles, so keep checking them for doneness. (is that a word?)

Step 7: Enjoy! We had ours with mashed potatoes, gravy, leftover Christmas turkey, and corn. Peas are good, too. Any kind of meat works- we have tried chicken, turkey, beef, and venison. Mmmm! Can't go wrong!

Here is the recipe. We quadrupled it, and had about 1 noodle left over. By the way, Margaret, thanks for teaching me about homemade noodles! :) I had never had them before I met Jim and we ate at your house!

Homemade Noodles

2/3 cup of flour

1 egg

1 tablespoon water

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon oil

And you know the rest!