Lately when I tell John we are having something homemade or made from scratch, he invariably finds an ingredient I didn’t make. For example, the other day we had homemade chicken noodle soup. “Did you make the noodles?” he asked. And of course, I hadn’t. I don’t know whether to feel complimented that he thinks that I can make everything, or annoyed that I’ve set the bar so high that he is no longer surprised when I do.

So today I set out to see if I could make a meal completely from scratch. I had planned on making ravioli today, but we haven’t successfully made a batch of cheese I could use to fill it with, so instead we made spaghetti. Well, I guess it was probably closer to linguini. The pasta was made from scratch from a recipe in my Good Housekeeping cookbook (exchanging the white flour for whole wheat). It is basically flour, salt and eggs. I had to add a bit of water too in order to get it to hold together as a dough, and kneading it was quite the workout as it is a very stiff dough. After letting it rest, I tried to tackle rolling it out thin. I’d love to have a pasta press, but I knew we could probably make something work without one. John came to my rescue and finished rolling the dough for me, as I was making pretty slow progress. It was still thicker than pasta should be, so Elise and I set to work cutting it into strips and rolling it again to make it thinner. It took a bit of time, but we ended up with a beautiful pile of whole wheat pasta.

I didn’t get pictures of it, but Will stepped in to help with the sauce making. He had fun helping me peel tomatoes and then enthusiastically started stirring seasonings into the resulting tomato pulp. We let it simmer for awhile before cooking and adding some ground beef from my Dad’s farm raised cow. For sides to our meal, I also made a garlic studded baguette with whole wheat flour and olive oil (another recipe from Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day) and green beans (fresh ones from Walmart).

The only ingredients that did not follow the rules exactly for the meal were the store-bought butter we spread on the bread (because I haven’t found a good source for raw cow milk yet), the freshly grated parmesan we sprinkled on top of the sauce (because it takes a minimum of 10 months to make parmesan cheese and I already have some in my refrigerator), and the whole milk the kids drank (which I had to give in and buy at the grocery store because we are out of goat milk). So I guess I didn’t completely succeed in doing a meal 100% from scratch, but it was pretty close. And it was delicious if I do say so myself. The time I spent in the kitchen today was pretty significant though, so I don’t think I could tackle this on just any day.