Tag Archives: food

My Attempt at Handmade Pasta

Yes­ter­day was pas­ta night in my cook­ing class at the Restau­rant School. For starters, I learned that I need to be more con­fi­dent in my mea­sure­ments when mix­ing wet and dry ingre­di­ents. I’m lucky that the teach­ing staff showed me the error of my ways and sal­vaged my dough.

The over­all lev­el of dif­fi­cul­ty isn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly high, but if you’re try­ing to make any sig­nif­i­cant amount of pas­ta for a big meal, you might think twice. I learned that a lot of effort goes into mak­ing a pound of pasta.

Home­made pas­ta is per­fect if you’re cook­ing for your­self or for date night. There’s a notice­able dif­fer­ence in the fla­vor and tex­ture than store bought mac­a­roni. Whip up a quick pesto and you have a deli­cious meal!

(Red wine, brought by class­mates, is a great companion!)

The pork!

The pork!, orig­i­nal­ly uploaded by Black­mail Is My Life.

Our friend Thad lov­ing­ly cared for this pork as it smoked for six­teen hours (pic­tured here at hour twelve.) This includ­ed mon­i­tor­ing it and adding water to the wood chips overnight. He used three ther­mome­ters each of which had a cor­re­spond­ing transpon­der. He kept both transpon­ders next to his head on his air mat­tress while he slept, wak­ing up repeat­ed­ly through­out the night to tend to the meat.

How did it taste? Let me give you an idea: there were twen­ty pounds of meat and only twelve guys at the cab­in. We start­ed eat­ing Sat­ur­day night and it was all but gone Sun­day morning.

I did men­tion that it was a great week­end, right?