Pasta Photo Essay

So maybe I didn't make this homemade pasta today, on a Tuesday, after finishing up the Contracts portion of the first few weeks, and finding out I am terrible at remedies and damages and third party beneficiaries... BUT last week, I made these noodles from a frozen ball of dough and took tons of pics. Today I made a sauce and thawed out some really-overdue-for-eating meatballs from a bag. Hey, it can't all be done by hand after a long day of studying.

The finished product, plus a few Instagram effects.

The dough is just all purpose flour and eggs. About 3/4 of a cup of flour per egg. You can add a little water or olive oil if it is too crumbly and dry. The Kitchenaid mixer makes this process a hell of a lot easier. It also makes it simpler if you have a huuge batch of dough and freeze the leftover in balls for later.

Mash the ball of dough semi-flat (you don't even need a rolling pin) and pass it through the machine after you turn it on and make sure it's on the widest setting.

Continue passing the dough through the machine, slowly decreasing the width of the setting [make it thinner].
Eventually it will get hard to manage and you may have to cut the dough in half [if, like me you started with a rather large ball of dough]

Yeah, you MAY have to cut it in half. It can get pretty long.

After running it through the cutting tool on the machine, you have the noodles! Sorry for the blur, zoomed in on the pasta.
Grandma gave me this pasta maker and it is a real gem. And so fun. And easy.

Toss the pasta with flour so it doesn't stick to itself. Let it dry on the counter [or a pan or a plate if you're cleaner than me].
You can then cook it OR freeze it for a while in ziplock bags.
[I'm not sure for how long it lasts in the freezer. You can probably Google it, but after 3 weeks it's still tasted good to me].

Salt your water really well and boil until it tastes right.
Usually no more than 5 minutes when I make my pasta on the thinnest setting, but keep an eye on it.
 

For the sauce this time, I chopped onions and garlic, sauteed them for a while in a combination of butter and olive oil [not much of either! not trying to get fat], then put a finely chopped red bell pepper [food processor fine] in the pan too and cook for a little while longer. I added about a can of petite diced tomatoes or a little more. Normally I would've made the sauce from [more] scratch, but in the interest of weeknight cooking, I added a generic brand sauce in addition to these ingredients [but not too much!]. There might also be some white wine in there. Yeah, there definitely is. Along the way, to keep the sauce from getting too thick and to build the flavors [like Anne Burrell does in her bolognese recipe], I added water and let it reduce several times. I threw in the partially thawed [though already cooked] meatballs to cook in the sauce. At the very end I added some pasta water and let the sauce simmer until it was the right consistency for my liking. Instead of tossing the pasta in the sauce like I would normally do, I just put this concoction on top, mostly for aesthetic purposes of these pictures. Before I ate it, I tossed it around of course. The cheese on top is a three cheese Trader Joe's blend, but clearly there's parmesan in there.

The completed sauce! PS: 3 meatballs = 200 calories [of this brand]. They were pretty huge.

My incredibly staged photo of my bowl of pasta.

Just heaped up there in a mound to make it beautiful.

Like I was only gonna have one meatball...

Not gonna ruin it with your average Parmesan shake cheese.

All in all this was a pretty delicious meal. I wouldn't typically taint homemade pasta with a jarred sauce, but since this pasta is so easy to make now, I don't care as much. The addition of vegetables, lots of seasoning, and wine really helped it out. It was definitely pretty and tasted good to me [and Charlie, but he'd eat anything]. Next time though...

It has begun...

Well, I got all my bar prep books from Kaplan, and I knew that class officially started May 28th. Unfortunately, I did not realize the ridiculous magnitude of videos, documents, assigments, and "diagnostic tests" I would have to complete before that date. Hell, I'm going to the beach for Memorial Day weekend on Friday.

So today after completing three job applications, I finally signed into the website to discover all of this nonsense awaiting. I'm slowly completing the 150-question diagnostic test with TV breaks in between every ehh 30 or so questions, while coming to the realization that I remember little to nothing from 1L year classes. [I also recently gained access to a Netflix account and may have just watched a whole season of Scandal in less than 3 days.]

I really should have started posting pictures of things I cooked last week [during the post-law school-graduation period when I went crazy with my new KitchenAid mixer]. I'm also proud of all the things I found at the thrift store during that downtime and the fun pillow I sewed out of the excitement of having absolutely nothing to do. I'll do a few though...

 

I promise the quality of photos will increase, but for now, a jelly roll. Reminds me of my childhood. I may have only had a few before I made this one, but they are sooo delicious. Only takes 5 eggs and some parchement paper to get a cake to roll up like that. Oh, and there's a whole jar of raspberry preserves in that bad boy. Recipe via this lovely cookbook thanks to an ex who hated me so much he would not return to my house to get all of his possessions. I think his mother gave it to him. I also got to keep a nice blender.

 

Pound cake with lemon glaze. Cake recipe is from the same cookbook above and the glaze is from Southern Living, though I had to substitute half and half for whole milk. Delicious, or so everyone says. I found it a tad dry, but I blame that on Harris Teeter's lack of "cake flour" or maybe I just didn't look hard enough. I had to use a larger pan than I would've preferred so it was wider and shorter than it should have been, thus the close-up. Thanks, Instagram.

 

 

This homemade pasta with shrimp and pesto is the result of an effort made much easier by the aforementioned KitchenAid mixer and a pasta maker that my grandma gave me. Although it can be done with sheer willpower, a rolling pin, and a knife, having a few machines makes homemade pasta a much easier endeavor. And it is SO WORTH IT. The noodles are much more tender, cook faster, and just f'n awesome. I even froze some of them that were leftover [and I also froze a ball of dough because I was worn out from making so much- hope that was okay.]

 

 

Anyway, this is what the noodles looked like straight out of the pasta maker. Pretty cool.

For a nice little appetizer, my friend Matt brought over some foie gras he had frozen at his apartment for about two years. I googled how to sear it and we made it happen, balsamic glaze and all. Granted, between the three of us it was like two bites a piece, but those two bites were phenomenal. Cruelty be damned. Unfortunately that whole cooking and eating process happened so fast there are no pictures.

 

Well, on a different day, I set out on a quest to use the $10 yard sale sewing machine that my grandma also gave to me. I knew I was gonna be cheap about it, but thanks to the biggest thrift store I've ever been in, the Durham Rescue Mission, I was able to complete this exquisite piece for 75 cents [the pillow was .50 and the scrap "linen" was .25]. Those are some very cultured tiny monkeys. I even have fabric leftover. I learned how to make a pillow cover so I could change them as I pleased, and I also didn't want to trap my pillow in something I sewed if it ended up being terrible and ugly on my first try. Seriously, you can learn to do anything from blogs, like this one.

 

 

Thanks to a coupon from a nice man there, I was able to get SO much stuff for so cheap! In addition to the pillow ingredients, I got the short stories of Sherlock Holmes and a Southern Living cookbook from the book section. I went through all of the ladies' denim until I found a pair of Joe's Jeans for $3 [yea, they're regularly like $160, no big deal], and a pair of Express jeans that I used too make some sweet cut-offs. I got two coffee mugs and a liquid measuring cup for the kitchen. Then I found a Martha Stewart queen comforter that will be great for my duvet that currently holds a too-small quilt. Then, in order to get to $20 worth of stuff so that I could use the $5 off coupon, I found some sweet novelty hats. Now I can pretend that despite being an unemployed law student, I stayed at the Ritz in the Caymans. Or what's more likely, that I shot some ducks for bucks.