Egg Noodles :)

Egg noodles are shockingly simple.  I've looked up recipes but I also tend to just eye it.  So the ingredients are just flour, eggs, and salt.  I start with "a bunch" of flour, about 3 cups if you want a measurement.  Add about 1/2- 3/4 teaspoon of salt, more if you like it salty, and then 2-3 eggs.  I mix them up with my hands (Murphy's law of cooking says that this will be the time that no less than four people will be texting you) until the dough can make a pretty smooth ball.  I usually start with 2 eggs and see what the texture is like after mixing that thoroughly, and add another if it needs more liquid.  After three eggs, you can always start adding a teaspoon of water at a time if its still too dry until you get a good texture.

Then grab a handful of the dough (about 1/4 of the total but it really doesn't matter) and plunk it on a (very!) well floured countertop.  Roll it out with your handy dandy wine bottle using more flour to keep the dough from sticking.  When you have it as thin as you want, use a sharp knife or pizza cutter to cut the noodles into strips.  Thicker rolls of dough taste more and more like baby dumplings, thinner have more of a noodley texture.  3 cups of flour makes enough noodles for a good sized crock pot of chicken soup.  But of course, since this recipe is so simple you can cut it down to 1 cup of flour and 1 egg to make noodles for one or two people.  You can let your uncooked noodles rest for a day or so in a sealed container but I never have time or foresight for that.  To cook- drop your noodles into boiling water for about 10 minutes.  If you're adding them to a crock-pot soup, you can simply put them in the broth about half an hour before you want to eat :)

You can add flavoring to the dough as well.  (My guy friend said that the recipe above wasn't interesting enough.  This is for people like him.)  Thus far I've only done garlic and spinach but I've seen recipes for beet, pumpkin, and carrot flavored pasta.  For spinach pasta I sauteed some minced garlic in about a tablespoon of olive oil for about a minute, then added a LOT of spinach.  Really, it seems like filling the entire 12 inch frying pan with an inch and a half of spinach would be too much, but it cooks down so much that I actually filled it a second time.  So all in all I used about 1/2 of a bag of spinach.  Then you put the hot mess right into the blender and pulverize it.  Add the spinach puree to the dough before you add your eggs, and adjust the number of eggs according to how sticky the dough is.  The puree substitutes about 1 egg.  Then roll out your pretty green dough just like before.  I sauteed a few tomatoes chunked up with garlic for a sauce.  And it was divine!

Feel free to play with this recipe!  If you think a little melted butter is in order, use that instead of water to make the dough the right texture, or use milk.  This is just the basic proportions that I use and it has worked well for me!