Weekend cooking adventures
The biggest news of the weekend was making homemade fresh pasta for the first time.
After being served fresh pasta by merlinofchaos several months ago in one of my usual Sunday afternoon visits and hearing how easy it was to make, I decided it'd be cool to get my own pasta maker. I did some research on Amazon and settled on the Marcato Atlas Wellness 150, stuck it on my Amazon Wish List, and walked away for a time when I could afford to buy it.
Fast forward to Christmas, and someone actually bought it for me. Squeeeee. :) I'd meant to take it out for a test drive the previous weekend, but all the oncall work trashed that idea.
So--this weekend. I made a point of trying it this weekend.
That particular package comes with the ability (according to the contents) to make lasagna (which I can only think is via the initial roller device), then spaghetti and fettucine noodles via a clever attachment. (Amazon sells other attachments for it, including linguine, angel hair, and ravioli (!)) I'm a big fan of flat noodles, so I went with fettucine.
The machine came with a pasta dough recipe, but it called for 1 lb. of flour, so I instead used Mark Bittman's recipe in How to Cook Everything which was a pretty simple 2 cups of AP flour, 3 eggs, 1 tsp of salt, and 'a few drops of water if its dry'. The resulting dough is supposed to be 'easy to work' and 'smooth'.
Ha. Hahahahaha.
I wound up having to add a crapton of water to get it to that stage, I'd guess almost a quarter of a cup. Prior to that, it was super crumbly and rough as hell. But I finally got it to a consistency that at least vaguely resembled the picture in the directions for the pasta maker and switched over to that to use the machine.
It was a revelatory learning process--learning how big a sheet of rolled out pasta a certain size of dough ball becomes, how to feed the dough with only two hands and having to hand-crank the machine, then what to do with the extruded pasta. The process itself is pretty straight forward--once I had the dough formed, it was maybe 15 minutes for me to process it all through the machine and have fettucine on the other side. But I still need to dial-in the finer details. Like, with the recipe I did (which has you split the resulting dough into sixths), two balls at once seems to be the best maximum amount to work with at a time; one is the easiest, but there was a lot more waste scraps left over at the end IMO. The resulting pasta really does need to be dusted with something--I used extra flour, but in discussing it with Merlin later, he said some people use either cornstarch or rice flour (which would make sense--they're lower in gluten/binding power)--to keep it from sticking to itself or each other. And I need to do a better job of spreading the noodles out to dry--a drying rack may be more essential than I realized. As it was, I just kind of threw it all on a large cutting board on top of itself, and the moisture from the pasta eventually evenly distributed and glued a number of the noodles together into big clumpy sections.
(Actually, typing all that out, I suspect the dough could really do with being allowed to rest for 15-20 minutes before processing it for exactly that last reason).
Anyway. I made it for dinner last night and shared with ebonlock with a jarred pumpkin-tomato sauce I found at the new local megamart a couple weeks ago. I don't know if it tasted any better (yet) then store-bought fresh pasta, but there was a certain self-satisfaction with knowing "I made this".
So, in addition to the pasta, breakfast this weekend was my extrapolated riff on huevos rancheros based on a recipe I found via Google and memories of a long ago college roommate making them sometimes.
My version involved preheating the oven on 'Broil' while browning one side of a low carb flour (instead of corn) tortilla in a small oven-safe skillet (more on this in a second) then re-greasing (with cooking spray) the pan while flipping it over, uncooked side down. On the crisped top, I layered salsa, making a little bit of a wall around the edges with the chunky bits, then cracked two eggs into the middle (it ran over a little, but no big whoop). Salt and pepper for seasoning, then into the oven with the rack at the very top and cooking it for 5-7 minutes until the eggs had begun to set. Take them out and sprinkle with cheese (I used a mix of sharp cheddar and Monterey Jack), then back into the oven for 2-3 minutes to let the cheese melt.
Remove from oven, slide onto a plate, and serve with finely chopped avocado and dollops of fat-free Greek yogurt (or sour cream).
Both mornings, when handling the skillet coming out of the oven, I kept up a mantra of 'use an Ove Glove, the handle is going to be scorching hot'. I remembered all the way up to the point of plating them yesterday morning (the last time I was going to be handling the scorching hot skillet), and then I forgot. The mental litany went something like 'Fuck fuck ow ow, how could you be so STUPID' as I put my right hand (bee tee dubs, I'm right-handed :P) under the running cool water.
I have lovely burns all over my fingers now--somehow the only finger that remains unscathed is my index finger (although, as Merlin commented, if there was one finger not to be burned, that was the best one). The worst spot is the side of the tip of my pinkie finger, which has a pretty prominent blister, because it also happens to be in the exact spot where I rest my pinkie against the side of a mouse (the other spots: the inside base of my ring finger, all three sections of my middle finger, although the second/middle section is the worst, and the side of my thumb just above the last joint but THANK GOD not on the ball). esmerel took pity on me and let me scavenge her box of burn band-aids and I have four. :P I probably could've used 1-2 more (for my middle finger), but four has been enough to make the pain tolerable without resorting to painkillers like I did not long after I did it.
So, as I said on Twitter: you win some, you lose some. :P
After being served fresh pasta by merlinofchaos several months ago in one of my usual Sunday afternoon visits and hearing how easy it was to make, I decided it'd be cool to get my own pasta maker. I did some research on Amazon and settled on the Marcato Atlas Wellness 150, stuck it on my Amazon Wish List, and walked away for a time when I could afford to buy it.
Fast forward to Christmas, and someone actually bought it for me. Squeeeee. :) I'd meant to take it out for a test drive the previous weekend, but all the oncall work trashed that idea.
So--this weekend. I made a point of trying it this weekend.
That particular package comes with the ability (according to the contents) to make lasagna (which I can only think is via the initial roller device), then spaghetti and fettucine noodles via a clever attachment. (Amazon sells other attachments for it, including linguine, angel hair, and ravioli (!)) I'm a big fan of flat noodles, so I went with fettucine.
The machine came with a pasta dough recipe, but it called for 1 lb. of flour, so I instead used Mark Bittman's recipe in How to Cook Everything which was a pretty simple 2 cups of AP flour, 3 eggs, 1 tsp of salt, and 'a few drops of water if its dry'. The resulting dough is supposed to be 'easy to work' and 'smooth'.
Ha. Hahahahaha.
I wound up having to add a crapton of water to get it to that stage, I'd guess almost a quarter of a cup. Prior to that, it was super crumbly and rough as hell. But I finally got it to a consistency that at least vaguely resembled the picture in the directions for the pasta maker and switched over to that to use the machine.
It was a revelatory learning process--learning how big a sheet of rolled out pasta a certain size of dough ball becomes, how to feed the dough with only two hands and having to hand-crank the machine, then what to do with the extruded pasta. The process itself is pretty straight forward--once I had the dough formed, it was maybe 15 minutes for me to process it all through the machine and have fettucine on the other side. But I still need to dial-in the finer details. Like, with the recipe I did (which has you split the resulting dough into sixths), two balls at once seems to be the best maximum amount to work with at a time; one is the easiest, but there was a lot more waste scraps left over at the end IMO. The resulting pasta really does need to be dusted with something--I used extra flour, but in discussing it with Merlin later, he said some people use either cornstarch or rice flour (which would make sense--they're lower in gluten/binding power)--to keep it from sticking to itself or each other. And I need to do a better job of spreading the noodles out to dry--a drying rack may be more essential than I realized. As it was, I just kind of threw it all on a large cutting board on top of itself, and the moisture from the pasta eventually evenly distributed and glued a number of the noodles together into big clumpy sections.
(Actually, typing all that out, I suspect the dough could really do with being allowed to rest for 15-20 minutes before processing it for exactly that last reason).
Anyway. I made it for dinner last night and shared with ebonlock with a jarred pumpkin-tomato sauce I found at the new local megamart a couple weeks ago. I don't know if it tasted any better (yet) then store-bought fresh pasta, but there was a certain self-satisfaction with knowing "I made this".
So, in addition to the pasta, breakfast this weekend was my extrapolated riff on huevos rancheros based on a recipe I found via Google and memories of a long ago college roommate making them sometimes.
My version involved preheating the oven on 'Broil' while browning one side of a low carb flour (instead of corn) tortilla in a small oven-safe skillet (more on this in a second) then re-greasing (with cooking spray) the pan while flipping it over, uncooked side down. On the crisped top, I layered salsa, making a little bit of a wall around the edges with the chunky bits, then cracked two eggs into the middle (it ran over a little, but no big whoop). Salt and pepper for seasoning, then into the oven with the rack at the very top and cooking it for 5-7 minutes until the eggs had begun to set. Take them out and sprinkle with cheese (I used a mix of sharp cheddar and Monterey Jack), then back into the oven for 2-3 minutes to let the cheese melt.
Remove from oven, slide onto a plate, and serve with finely chopped avocado and dollops of fat-free Greek yogurt (or sour cream).
Both mornings, when handling the skillet coming out of the oven, I kept up a mantra of 'use an Ove Glove, the handle is going to be scorching hot'. I remembered all the way up to the point of plating them yesterday morning (the last time I was going to be handling the scorching hot skillet), and then I forgot. The mental litany went something like 'Fuck fuck ow ow, how could you be so STUPID' as I put my right hand (bee tee dubs, I'm right-handed :P) under the running cool water.
I have lovely burns all over my fingers now--somehow the only finger that remains unscathed is my index finger (although, as Merlin commented, if there was one finger not to be burned, that was the best one). The worst spot is the side of the tip of my pinkie finger, which has a pretty prominent blister, because it also happens to be in the exact spot where I rest my pinkie against the side of a mouse (the other spots: the inside base of my ring finger, all three sections of my middle finger, although the second/middle section is the worst, and the side of my thumb just above the last joint but THANK GOD not on the ball). esmerel took pity on me and let me scavenge her box of burn band-aids and I have four. :P I probably could've used 1-2 more (for my middle finger), but four has been enough to make the pain tolerable without resorting to painkillers like I did not long after I did it.
So, as I said on Twitter: you win some, you lose some. :P