Popcorn FAIL

Oops.

A Special Dinner at Home: Part III

Hi lovelies! I'm sure you've all been waiting with bated breath at the finale in my three-part special dinner. Let's just pretend this happened, oh I don't know, last week, instead of in ... erm ... February. Oops!

If it weren't currently approximately eight thousand degrees, I would hop to making this pasta again. It was quite possibly the best pasta I have ever had. That it came from my own hands and labor was just icing on the cake. Er, pasta.

So, for this pasta, I used Jenna's recipe.  Mine obviously didn't turn out to be goat cheese ravioli, but the pasta base is the same. I looked in my Mario Batali cookbook, which obviously had a recipe, but it was complicated and long (TWSS!) so I opted for this one instead. Since Jenna's recipe was for one person, I doubled it. (Since, you know, 1 + 1 = 2. What? I was an English major.)

I started off by adding my eggs to the volcano of flour.

And then you squish and swirl and move it around until it becomes one cohesive ball of dough.

Then, you must let it rest so the gluten can calm down. This was not a problem since I was, at the time, baking bread, making ricotta cheese, roasting asparagus and making a sauce for the mussels. So yeah, I had some time to ignore the pasta.

When I had essentially finished everything else, I got to rollin'. This took the most time, since I wanted papparadelle-like pasta--wide, really thin strands. So rolled, and rolled, and then rolled some more, until the sheets of pasta were nearly transparent.

Then I cut them into long ribbons.

And then just cook as you would packaged pasta, in salty, boiling water. However, because it's fresh, it takes about two minutes to cook, so don't walk away from the pot.

I served the pasta with a sauce made from lemon zest, garlic, shards of proscuitto and the homemade ricotta cheese I had just completed. And oh my lord was it good. Transcendent, even. It was really effing good.

So the entire meal was homemade bread, roasted asparagus, homemade pasta with homemade ricotta, mussels for Cookie Monster, and bubbly. Wow. I've just impressed myself!