Umeboshi Roe Pasta

This lovely pasta dish is actually a happy mistake...no, not a mistake, more like a happy meander that occurred when we were trying to recreate another Japanese dish known as mentaiko pasta (which is super nom nom!)  

The problem with recreating that particular dish is that we couldn't find the main ingredient for it, Japanese cured cod roe.  So we played around and came up with something just as good (we think!) 

Our Umeboshi Roe Pasta is a simple to make creamy yet light pasta with a delicately tangy sauce dotted with umami bursts of roe that is so delicious and totally addictive.  Umeboshi really rock the flavor!

Homemade Egg Pasta

We had this really cool pasta noodle making machine in our house when we were growing up.  You've probably seen it before, it's the type you have to clamp on the table and then insert a crank handle in and you were off making all kinds of noodles.  

The only thing my grandma ever used our pasta machine for was for making her own wonton skins.  I would always volunteer to help her, gathering the long floury sheets of dough as they came out of the shiny silver machine.  It was so fascinating to witness a dull lump of dough become something else entirely: smooth, sleek, uniformly thin, almost translucent sheets that got cut into perfect squares of wonton skins.  

I recently became obsessed with the idea of making my own noodles and kept bugging my 媽媽 to ship over our old (and heavy!) pasta machine to me in Hong Kong.  Which she, of course, as any sane person would do, completely refused to do.  

Then I realized (duh!) that they still sell these pasta machines, pretty much unchanged in design and function, and for a wonderfully reasonable price.  So here is the first product from our shiny new pasta machine, this wonderful Homemade Egg Pasta, or 自製雞蛋麵.

Tomato Anchovy Pasta with Chives

There nothing else that has the simplicity, elegance and good taste of pasta.  One night we were too tired to go shopping for groceries and just scrounged around the kitchen to find cookables and ended up with this beauty of a pasta dish.