Spinach Fettuccine

For St. Patrick's Day, my kids demand green food, just as they demand to wake up to hearts leading the way from their bedrooms to a great Valentine's Day surprise and glorious Easter baskets, etc. The aftermath, I now suffer for doing cute things on holidays when they were younger that I may not necessarily feel like doing anymore. But, anyway. I made the obligatory green pancakes this morning. I got away with the inclusion of lettuce for lunch. And for dinner, I decided to try the Spinach Pasta in the Blendtec Twist Jar recipe book. I had a bunch of spinach from my Bountiful Baskets that I recently started to participate in that I needed to use. The pasta looks really appealing in the Blendtec photo, but I wasn't too sure it would turn out so well.

No, I don't think you're supposed to have to put this much flour on the pasta dough, but I had to.

It wasn't too hard to mix. The ingredients are pretty simple: spinach, white whole wheat flour, egg, and water. I didn't have white whole wheat so I used whole wheat pastry flour and organic all purpose flour and omitted the water because I had just washed the spinach. Well, I was right. The resulting "dough" was pretty sticky. I had to dust everything many times with more flour. (I should have just added another 1/4 to 1/2 cup of flour directly to the dough, but I felt I needed to stick to the recipe on this first go around). I cut them fettuccine style with a knife and let them dry for a while. Then, I had a heck of a time trying to peel them off my board. That's where I really started loosing faith in this recipe. But I made myself go on and threw them in the pot to cook them for about 6 minutes in boiling water. I made some grilled chicken strips (OK, they were frozen) and cream cheese sauce to help everyone with the task of eating this.

Much to my surprise, although, they did NOT look pretty, they tasted great and the texture was ... normal! The kids loved it!

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