Anyway, we made pasta today... umm... well, we actually destroyed some extruded spaghetti and the like (when the Kitchenaid manual says seperate immediately, do it). We did end up with small test quantities of angel hair (ish), fettuccini, and lasagna noodles (the reason for the exercise in the first place).
While I was napping, Basia translated mixed up flour and eggs plus many other scratch and non-scratch ingredients into a wonderful leftover-roast-chicken lasagna that I would gladly pay for at a restaurant. Between two adults and two small kids, we consumed more than half of it. Given the base cost of the ingredients, we will get two great meals and some culinary satisfaction for about 15 dollars.
OK. To the pictures. And I'll even let Basia rant on about it
for a moment on down the page. Thanks for reading again!
Hey, I finally get a chance to get a word in edge wise (snickering inside). I've been wanting to make homemade pasta for a long time but as with anything else doing something for the first time it's a little intimidating. It really was easy. Next time the kids will be allowed to "help".
Wade and I have been having fun with our Kitchenaid Stand Mixer ('ol Blue and Mixtress) and this was no exception. We made the pasta before Wade had to go pick up Sarah. We had a good laugh in discovering all of our pasta maker parts. The biggest laugh we had was at Wade's expense (yet again). We were trying dilligently to make fettuccini and the gosh darn dough WOULDN'T go through the rollers. Then I noticed the problem ... I screamed "STOP, STOP, STOP, STOP" ... then I laughed. Wade had installed the rollers UPSIDE DOWN! Just because it said "Made in Italy" doesn't mean that's the "top" of the machine. After fixing the problem, the fettuccini noodles were being rolled out and examined. "Not bad". However, we realized that the straighter you fed the dough into the rollers, the less noodle splinters were created.
Sorry, I digress ... the lasagna was made with leftover roasted chicken, pesto sauce and jarred Ragu spaghetti sauce, chedder cheese, mozarella AND Eggplant. It must have been really been good for Wade to eat Eggplant! !Even the kids liked it!
One of the biggest compliment that Wade has given me about my cooking is that he would "pay for this in a restaurant" - Wow! That's a far cry from the first time I made some chicken soup for Wade when he was sick and we had just started dating. The soup was really bad but he ate it anyway. That's true love!
Some of the advantages of making your own food is that you know exactly what's in your food and how your family is eating. You can make "substitutions" and not get charged up the wa-zu for it ($2.00 for each additional pizza topping). Wade and I are not particularly fond of the ricotta cheese used in typical lasagna recipes - so, I didn't put any in and the results are a spectacular WOW!
Being a true "stay-at-home mom" does have it's advantages and ONE of them is that you get to experiment in the kitchen. It's good family fun and educational (huh?) - for the kids to know where food comes from.
Well, that's all for this edition of "familyfuninthekitcken". There'll be more after Easter - I'll be attempting to make Challah.
Ciao,
Basia
PS. If this post seems to go on a bit too long, know that it is only because we haven't stopped typing yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment