My grandmother bought us a pasta maker attachment for our KitchenAid stand mixer as a wedding gift, knowing that not only would I love it, I'd probably also use it and invite her over for dinner to test it.
Being mildly paranoid about using wedding presents before the actual wedding (and being a strict adherent of Emily Post's etiquette), I packed it away in a cupboard, and then continued with the wedding planning.
Apparently five months after the wedding is high time to take that pasta maker out of its box. Thus, Mr. V and I gathered around the pasta machine, and prepared to do battle. Now, I've seen Mario Batali and Gordon Ramsay make pasta on TV before, and it didn't look that complicated. And truly, it's not. Flour and eggs are not expensive ingredients, and due to my obsession with baking, they're something we always have on hand. Mr. V, having stronger hands, made the dough while I prepped vegetables for the mushroom bolognese that I found in a Canadian Living vegetarian cookbook. Little did I know that we'd be chopping mushrooms until we had eight cups of tiny shreds.
Not the point, but thank the deity of your choice for the food processor.
Anyway, the dough went well, and then it rested while I continued to chop vegetables (possibly while singing along to The Trews, because singing to vegetables makes them chop easier. It's a little known old wives tale.)
Running it through the pasta machine was mildly trickier. When we've seen Batali and Ramsay do it, they make the dough and then hang the noodles from a pasta drying rack or some such. Needless to say, we have nothing of the sort, and I refused to hang pasta from my cupboards in case they were dirty. We ended up tossing them in flour and putting them in a bowl.
Meanwhile, the pasta sauce is bubbling away and its resemblance to a meat sauce is mildly terrifying. As usual, I've followed the recipe to the letter, but the sauce is ... not so good right now. Not to say that it wasn't a quite serviceable sauce, but it was bland, and we cannot have a bland sauce. Adding salt didn't work, and neither did adding pepper. We had already put oregano in the sauce, which stood in for the nutmeg that Mr. V detests. Cayenne pepper rescued us, and soon the sauce was bubbling away on the stove again, mildly enhanced so it actually tasted like something other than mushrooms.
By this time the water was boiling and it was time to cook our homemade spaghetti. Being used to dried pasta, I was mildly nervous about the short cooking time required for fresh noodles, and may have had to be convinced that they were fine and ready to eat.
Verdict? Delicious. The noodles were fresh and light, and while apparently the sauce couldn't pass for real meat sauce because the texture was different, it was indeed a very yummy meal, and a good first try for the novice pasta makers. Perhaps it is time we invite Grandma over to sample our wares.
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