When friends move away it’s sad. [Insert sad emoticon here]. Recently my friends RnR moved to D.C. which is a bummer for obvious reasons—they are awesome and now D.C. just got infinitely more cool—and also means I’m hunting a replacement couple to double date with to rock shows, restaurants, and art galleries (if it’s you, send me a love letter). While it’s a bummer for me, at the same time it’s an exciting opportunity for them. After helping pack them up and ship them off I was left with a parting gift, a pasta maker. Squeee! Now I can think of them every time I hand roll out my own dough.
But, wah, there’s a theme here. The first night I busted out the pasta maker was to make dinner with another friend who, yep, you guessed it, is moving. If anyone wants to move TO Denver let me know. There are some openings in my calendar. So, sayonara RnR and Nicholio. I’ll load up on carbs til we meet again…
Today’s post is less of a recipe and more of a visual narrative. I hope you enjoy the ride.
First off, the directions were in Italian, hilariously. On second thought that might only be funny to me, but I’d like you to image two girls forgoing sounding out foreign words and instead just trying to put the machine together using the skills they taught us in Girl Scouts. I speak Home Depot and IKEA fluently, thank you, so if I can put together furniture with umlauts, I can handle a pasta maker me thinks.
The base recipe we dug up was from the Joy of Cooking, which, next to the two Julia Child bibles, is a cook’s best friend. We added parsley and tarragon as well as tons of fresh cracked black pepper to our pasta, which was an excellent decision.
After kneading and rolling it into this cute little ball you’re supposed to let it sit for an hour. We were hungry and are not patient people so we only let it sit 30 minutes. Our pasta dough was still kind of sticky so perhaps that hour is necessary. Whoops.
I love this photo because it reminds me of a little kid peeking out from beneath the table cloth. Only I’m the little kid and I’m watching Nichole flour and cut the pasta.
You roll it, and cut it, and mark it with a…no wait, that’s a pie. Well, you do roll it up into cute little rolls and then cut it. So I’m not a complete liar.
Ta da! Pasta! Ours didn’t all unroll completely so we had little sticky lumps in some cases. But they were delicious little sticky lumps nonetheless! As I practice with the machine more and start creating my own recipes I’ll post ’em here.
xo,
L.
