What to serve at Valentine’s dinner for your darling that is homemade and original… Pale pink pasta, made with beetroot juice for the colour and with fresh eggs for the taste. Team this up with any of my crab linguine, truffle carbonara, midnight spaghetti recipes and you have the perfect romantic dinner. The pasta, when cooked, goes the most beautiful shade of pale rose pink and looks pretty and tastes sublime with a fab texture. This recipe is perfect if you want to spoil your squeeze…or guests. Buon appetito.

Recipe

Serves 2.

Ingredients:
300g of plain flour spelt flour or even better 00 flour..read notes below
3 medium eggs
300g of freshly grated fresh beetroot
1/2 teaspoon of salt
More flour for kneading
Semolina
A pasta maker machine (you can get one for as little as £15.00 if you shop around, so it can work out as economical as home made pasta is super cheap to make and far more delicious)

How:
Place the grated beetroot in a saucepan with about a cup of water. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 15 minutes. Strain and press through a sieve.
Put the strained liquid back on the stove to simmer till reduced to about quarter of a cup in quantity. Leave to cool.
Put all the wet ingredients in to a food processor (eggs and beetroot juice) and blitz then add the salt and flour and process till it comes together. This should only take about 30 seconds.
Place the pasta dough in a floured surface and knead till smooth and elastic. Add more flour if it’s sticky. This can take up to fifteen minutes (nothing’s too much for your darling) then wrap in cling film and leave to rest for a couple of hours.
Cut the dough into four pieces and dust lightly with flour.
Flatten each piece into an oblong shape and feed through the pasta machine on its widest setting, which is number 1.
Fold it on itself and repeat until it’s smooth and elastic.
Then, decrease the setting size on the machine until you have a thin sheet of pasta. Feed this through the tagliatelle setting in the machine. You might want to trim the pasta as it passes through so it doesn’t get too long.
Cook straight away, or dry the pasta out by draping off a rack or chair back for about 20 minutes then place in a single layer on a baking tray dusted with semolina.
Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate over night or until needed.
Cook in boiling salted water for about five minutes or until cooked through and tender.
Then add your chosen sauce.