Easy home-made pasta using expensive equipment!

The $400 machinery is, of course, my Kitchen Aid mixer, which is on the left.  It's actually not a great mixer, and does a rather poor job of kneading bread.  But it's a great, if somewhat overpriced, pasta machine.  You'll also need the Pasta Roller attachment ($100).

The other ingredients you need are quite cheap:

• 3 cups semolina flour (standard coarse ground)
• 3 cups white flour (you can sneak in 1 cup whole wheat if you really want)
• 2 eggs or 1/2 cup fake eggs
• 1/2 tsp salt
• up to 1 cup cold water

(Ignore the meyer lemons in the picture; that's from a failed attempt to make meyer lemon flavored pasta.  Flavored pasta is generally more trouble than it's worth.)

Put all the flour and the salt in the work bowl of the mixer.  Mix on low for a few minutes, until homogenized.  Add the eggs; mix until incorporated. Gradually add the water, a couple tablespoons at a time, just until the dough reaches a "scrambled eggs" consistency, as shown below:

Now, take the dough out of the bowl and form it into 3 balls, about 1lbs each.  It should take some work to press the balls together (banging them on the counter is recommended) and the dough shouldn't be sticky at all.  When you've made the balls of dough as cohesive as you can, wrap them tightly in plastic wrap and put them in the fridge for at least 1/2 hour.  At this point, the dough can also be frozen; since 1lb is enough for a hearty meal for 2 people, and 1.5lbs is enough for lasagna, you probably will want to freeze some.

Take the balls out of the fridge. Cut them into slices and pound the slices smooth and flatter with a rolling pin.  Roll the slices through the pasta roller on its widest setting (1), several times, turning the slice 90 deg. and folding into thirds each time.

When the dough is smooth, start rolling it through on progressively narrower settings until it reaches the desired thickness -- I find that #5 or #6 on the KitchenAid works for most things.  You may want to dust it with semolina flour while stacking the noodles, or they may stick.  Definitely when you reach your target thickness, thoroughly flour your noodles.

Then you can use the pasta cutter attachment to make fettucine or spaghetti.  Make sure you spread them out on the counter; if you mound the noodles or put them in a bowl, they'll stick together and you'll have to start over from scratch.

Boil 1lbs of pasta in at least 4 quarts of salted water, for 3-4 minutes only.

Failure Conditions and notes:

• If the pasta is too dry, and crumbles instead of kneading, then moisten it slightly with a water sprayer and fold it over and roll it out a few times.
• If the dough is too sticky and starts sticking to the rollers, then dust it with semolina flour between each roll until it no longer is sticky.
• If you don't have a KitchenAid or an Imperia, or similar, you can do this with a rolling pin ... but it's a lot more work and you probably won't do it more than once.
• This is a "general purpose" pasta recipe, suitable for recipes for either egg pasta or semolina pasta.
• Why do traditional recipes tell you to make a well with the flour in the middle of your table and put eggs in the well and mix it with a fork?  It's a longstanding Italian joke on Americans.  They laugh their butts off thinking of us mopping our floors frantically, trying in vain to get the mixture of eggs and flour up off the hardwood.