This past Saturday night we were invited over to our friend Jen’s house for dinner. The invitation made mention of “homemade pasta”, but I wasn’t aware that we were going to be the ones making it. I kind of assumed that since Jen is quite the foodie that she just had an itch to make homemade pasta and we were going to eat it, but instead, we ended up making it, for the most part. Pat had already prepared the dough, which apparently is just flour, eggs and salt… who knew, and since the dough was already made, all we had to do was send it through the pasta maker to flatten it and cut it into spaghetti noodles. It sounds like it would be an easy process, but believe me, it was a lot harder than it sounds. Pat said that his grandmother used to do this all by herself when they were kids, but we had 4 people working on the thing and had trouble. Our main issue was that the flattened dough kept folding over as it went through the spaghetti cutter side of the machine. Oh, did I mention that this wasn’t some fancy automatic pasta maker? We were hand turning this thing. After a handful of failed attempts, we managed to get some good looking spaghetti out of it.
Along with the homemade spaghetti noodles, Jen also made homemade meatballs before we got there, which were delicious. And Pat’s brother makes and bottles his own sauce, which was also quite good. Jen made a salad to accompany the meal, which was ok, I’m just not a big fan of salad unless I can drown it in delicious, fattening salad dressing…. Oil and vinegar is not my ideal salad dressing. So while I normally don’t like food, this stuff actually tasted pretty good. My only complaint is that it takes so damn long to make this kind of stuff. Pat had already made the dough ahead of time and it still took us an hour to roll out and cut the dough into spaghetti noodles. I’m sure if we had a fancy automatic pasta maker it wouldn’t have taken nearly as long, but where’s the fun in that? This is also the reason why I don’t always like to cook… it just takes too long and when I’m hungry I want to eat right then.
All said and done, the meal was amazing, and the best part about it is it didn’t cost us a dime! Come to think of it, I didn’t spend any money on dinner/drinks this whole weekend… that’s rare. So thanks again to Pat and Jen for their hospitality and a great night with some great food. Next time is at our house and I’ll make homemade hotdogs, right out of the package.
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