Pappardelle with beef cheeks

It was getting late. We had gone to a New Year's open house of a good friend who always puts out an awesome spread. I told myself that I wouldn't eat that much, but I did. In fact, we ate so much that we went home afterwards instead of heading to Peter Chang's, which we originally planned on doing because we were right in their neighborhood.

It was around 7.30pm that Josh said, I'm hungry. Well, I said, I can make pasta with the leftover beef cheeks from 246.

So Josh took out a frozen tub (a small tub though) from the freezer and I put it into a bowl to defrost a bit while I made the pasta.

Two large eggs, two cups flour. I swear this has been my base recipe and everything has been great. Or maybe it was 3 large eggs to 2 cups flour. Anyway, I didn't bring it quite to the kneading level before letting Josh take over. He said the dough was very tough and hard to knead, and there was so much flour left over! He said we should let it rest before rolling out to let the dough relax. Well, okay.

Here's the leftover beef cheek from NYE. I ate about half of it at the restaurant, so you can see how good-sized the portion was. There were two broccoli florets left. I munched those up. Cook's snack. Then I brushed off the gremolata and breadcrumbs and checked for leftover polenta.

I put it into a non-stick pan on low heat with a silicon cover.

I rolled out the pasta in two batches. It was pretty hard to get going into a smooth dough, but once I had gotten it there, it rolled out well. As usual, I took it out to thickness 8, which is the second to last setting on my pasta roller.

The sheets came out long, as they always do. I cut the sheets down to about 18 inches long. That's how I roll.

I was thinking a kind of "free-form lasagna", even though I never order things like that. So I went pretty thick with the noodles, noting that when you go as thinly as I do with the pasta, it doesn't really thicken up that much when it cooks. So I went about an inch thick. I originally planned to make extra pasta to freeze, but there wasn't really enough. So I cut it all up.

When I'm going thick on pasta and hand-cutting it, I like to roll it up and slice it with a chef's knife. You have to make sure that your dough is well floured before you do this. (If it dries a little, that maybe helps a little, too.)

Immediately after cutting, I pull the strips apart and liberally douse it with flour and put it on a tray until they are all cut and ready to cook.

I had briefly checked on the beef cheek and it was sizzling a little more than I wanted, so I had added a smidgen of water to the pan. When I was about to put the pasta in the water, I pulled the beef cheek out and pulled it apart. You can see how luscious the meat is and how all the gelatinous yumminess is in there. Oh yeah, I also chopping up the remaining cippoline onions and shared those.

Our stove takes a long time to boil a big pot of water so I had pre-boiled the water and then when the pasta was ready to cook, I turned it back on. I went heavy-handed with the salt since it's fresh pasta. Two minutes in the pot and then I drained it. It was pretty steamy.

I originally thought that I would use only half the sauce and save the rest to use with an eggplant parmigana or something. So I pulled out a bowl, tossed in the pasta, and added some sauce. And then more sauce. And mixed.

While it turned out fine, if I had known I would have needed all the sauce, I would have mixed it in the pan and added in some of the pasta water I had reserved. (It looks okay here, but fresh pasta continues to absorb liquid and it turned out a little drier than I like, which probably means that's how it should turn out, but I like it saucy.)

I served up the pasta in bowls, (relatively) new square stoneware from Cost Plus that hold a good amount and topped it with the beef cheek and onions.

I swear this picture looked in focus when I was snapped it or maybe I was too hungry to take several shots as I had to for most of the other photos.

It was pretty tasty, even if it wasn't that quick. I like that we used up leftovers. The fridge is still at maximum capacity. We did decide that for a super wide pasta like this, it was too long. So maybe down to twelve inches next time. Or eight even.