My New Toy

Last winter, when we invited Dennis and Gale for dinner aboard Steadfast, they offered to bring homemade pasta.  

-Where did you get homemade pasta here in the Exumas, aka: the land of no grocery stores, gourmet or otherwise?

-I make it myself aboard GadAbout, he boasted.

I've been thinking about that night ever since.

When I was a hippie, mother-of-the-earth, back in the day, I have wanted my very own pasta roller.  I borrowed on once for a week.  I made every conceivable type of coloured pasta over three days:  carrot, spinach, beet, you name it.  Those machines were expensive and I was inpecunious in those days.  I seem to recall the number 250.....  The years have passed, I have saved my shekles and prices have come down to completely reasonable.  

Hurrah, I got one!

The first time I got ready to make pasta for supper with my new toy, Hubby gave up waiting and made the ready-made store-bought kind instead.  I used the gourmet, authentic recipe from the expensive book I bought with the machine.  D R Y doesn't come close to describing the dough and the exhaustive labour involved in working this stuff.  Another learning curve ball came when I used the super-small cutting rollers.  Boy! was that stuff skinny, breakable, weird.

Today, I used the easy, Non-Italian, easy, softer, super-easy recipe with half soft flour and half duram semolina and eggs.  A much more pliable dough and lots of fun to roll out and cut.

Did I mention one needs super long arms and several extra hands to position, gather, hold and spread out the pasta as it rolls out longer and longer and L O N G E R?????

No, not meatballs, not pesto, not Alfredo.  Tonight we are using up last night's leftover steak in a veggie stir fry.  Pasta goes with anything, right?