As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Carolyn got me a pasta maker for my birthday. Today being a bank holiday and all, I had some time to do a little shopping. Alas, right around the time I had planned on taking a leisurely stroll through the park on my way to get some cooking items, it decided to rain. It hasn’t rained in the London in over 6 weeks. So this wasn’t a bad thing. Alas, it wasn’t the usual gentle drizzle I’ve been told about. Plus, I managed to buy and lose an umbrella in about 30 minutes (this is why I don’t even bother — fortunately, it only cost me a pound).

Anyhoo, now that I had some more things to make real food (a frying pan, a baking pan, measuring implements, ETC), I decided it was the perfect day to try out my new toy. In a nutshell, I am having trouble believing that people don’t just make their own pasta. Of all the things that are simple to make, pasta is braindead. It requires two ingredients and a little bit of money on something to make it look pretty.

As I had only made pasta once before so I didn’t need to spend a lot of time researching. All you do is take equal parts flour and egg (so 1 cup of flour and 1 egg), put the flour in a mound with a cup-shape in the middle, stick the egg in middle and make a mixture until it’s nice and dough-like. It is, however, easier said than done. The egg never sits in the flour happily and just wants to ooze all over the place. Since I’d seen it happen before, I was prepared and managed to sort of recover. But recovering meant the pasta was a little too dry so it didn’t ball up nicely. I set it aside and let it breath for a couple of hours (covered) and then it was time to break out the pasta maker. It’s basically a combination built-in rolling pin and cutter (this one has spaghetti and fettuccine shaped). I was nervous about the dough being too dry and not rolling well and it didn’t. But I decided that, even if this went into the trash, I should practice to get used to the past maker. The learning curve was about 10 minutes of trying and re-trying to flatten the pasta. It was really simple and wonderful and it managed to make my dry ball of dough look good. Once it was made, I let it sit whilst I boiled some water. It cooked in less than 5 minutes and, even with my lack of skills in dough-making, it tastes 10x better than the shit in a bag. It even tastes good using crappy store-bought sauce. Never again. I’ll just take an hour on the weekend and make enough pasta for the week.

Next up: I start making sauces again. Carolyn also got me a cooking book (Anne, you’ll recognize it!) called “How to Cook Everything” and it’s got a bunch of good looking sauce recipes. I’m starting to cook again. Baby steps.

In the meantime, here’s the pasta shortly after it was rolled and the implement that made it possible:

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 12:37 pm and is filed under completely random, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.