Noodles!

So! Still hot! And I think I have a cold, or allergies, because my head feels heavy and my eyes are burning and I keep sneezing. But I will keep on going, because I have a lot of cooking ahead of me.

Tomorrow I'll be making a tomato sauce with sausage, a tomato sauce without sausage, and a pesto. To go with them, I will be making a very large amount of homemade pasta. Fortunately, I have Charlie to help in all of this. He's still working on gaining confidence as a cook, but he's really pretty good. It also helps that these are all foods we've made enough times that I won't need to consult recipes, and they're all things I can more or less guarantee will turn out.

Making pasta is so much fun! It's sort of like the Fuzzy Pumper Barber set I had for my playdough when I was little, except that when you eat the end result of this it tastes good. (Well, playdough also tastes kind of good, but homemade pasta is even better.) And homemade pasta is really, really tasty. What with the freshness and the eggs and all.

After a short time making pasta, Charlie and I are already deviating from the recipes we've started out with. I now go with two cups of flour to three eggs, plus a little bit of water, unless the eggs are on the big side. You make a flour mountain, make a little volcano top in the middle, and plop your eggs in the hole like a virgin sacrifice (horrible joke. I'm sorry). You scramble the eggs with a fork, and then start pulling flour into them. When they stop being runny, you start mixing with your hands. When its turns into a dough, you start kneading it. And you keep needing it for about 10 minutes. At that point you either start running through the pasta machine, or you get out a rolling pin and start rolling. Either way, you keep going until it's a noodle type thinness, at which point you cut it, cook it, and eat it. And it's awesome!