DIY: Spinach Pasta!

In coordination with my previous post, I would like to share a fun and healthy thing I made last week....Spinach pesto pasta! My wonderful Italian grandmother passed away yesterday, so I think it is only fitting to publish this in her honor. I'm fairly certain she never cooked anything healthy, but she did cook alot of pasta.

First, I am the blessed owner of a pasta machine, purchased because I wanted to make pasta with whole grain flour instead of eating the boxed stuff. Last week I started to ponder the power of pesto and the benefits of spinach, and thus was born my idea. Here are my tools:

Eggs, spinach, whole wheat flour, blender, pasta machine, and a little bit of basil. (I cheated and used a packet for the actual pesto.) Since pasta dough is essentially just eggs and flour, I decided to blend the spinach leaves in with the eggs, and came up with:

It LOOKS nasty, but it's healthy! After that I added flour until there was no stickiness in the dough, and then I separated it into golf-ball sized sections. (Once you crank it through the pasta machine, the pieces become HUGE.) Voila:


I put it through the next section on the pasta machine, and behold my...linguini??


I failed to get a final picture...so this is as good as it gets.

I mixed around in pesto, and it was enjoyed by all! Even the 14 year old brother who thought it looked weird admitted it was tasty.

The moral of the story is that there are other main dishes besides meat. And very good for you!