Pasta-mia!

So I went home for a visit in January, taking Moo and Toots, but the Hubs had to stay behind and earn a living. Bummer. But while we were there, my brother and I tried our hand at making our own pasta. Now, my brother and I are game to try to make almost anything in the kitchen and I was a bit excited to try this out. As you can clearly see, we did not have the proper pasta making equipment, but were reassured by many on-line resources that many authentic Italian 90-year-old chubby women made pasta every day without such machines as well...so off we went. Our first problem was using a Jamie Oliver recipe that everyone reviewed as being great...ours turned into a rock hard clump that I had to turn over to Bro because it was way past the point where I could knead it and it darn near broke his wrists too. Then we let it "rest" for an hour in the fridge while Bro "rested" his poor little forearms. When we took it out to roll it we had the same problem - ROCK hard and it just wouldn't roll thin enough. So we rolled it as thin as we could and cut it into strips as thin as we could, then we rolled those again. What we ended up with was a bowl draped with leathery, misshapen gobs of dough we weren't sure we wanted to actually eat. But Grammy was a trooper and told us to cook them up. Let me just say that one little scoop of that pasta FILLED YOU UP! It was so dense that a tiny bit of the stuff, well, stuffed you. It didn't taste bad, it just wasn't pasta. It was a cross between scones and pasta, covered in spaghetti sauce. We vowed to try again, following an Italians' recipe instead of a Brits'. I mean really, what were we thinking?