Day 31

Welcome to Italy! We are with a guest instructor today learning some hand made pasta recipes. We start with dough. We made egg pasta and semolina pasta. Later we made gnocchi dough.


We let our dough rest while we made sauces and prepped what would eventually be lunch. We picked basil from our plants outside and cleaned it up. Okay that is a benefit of our
hot weather, we have basil almost year round.


We had such a pretty assortment of colors. We made a pesto from this with pistachios instead of pine nuts. We made filling for ravioli too. It was just ricotta, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and Parmesan cheese to taste. It made a lovely filling.


Yes, they were big. Not huge but like small sombreros almost as big as my palm. I ate two leftover cold this morning. Gross? Hell, no. They were great. And the texture of the pasta was fantastic. We used the egg pasta for the ravioli. We cut paperadelle and some fettuccine from the egg pasta also. The cut pasta was to be tossed with a simple meat and tomato sauce that we simmered while cutting shapes.

Nope, still can't figure out how to rotate pictures. If you can, let me know.
We made little ear shaped pasta with the semolina pasta. I can't spell it, but it might be orcheiette. or not. We treated it the same way we did our potato gnocchi. We tossed it in browned butter with some fresh sage leaves. That was grub.

Pasta day was all hands on. I can see, however, that this is something that you could do for the next 30 years and still be figuring it out. I might make it more often. Maybe. For sure if someone else wants to clean up my kitchen afterwards.
Tomorrow: Italian style grilling, a risotto, and minestrone.