Home-Made Pasta

In the panoply of international cooking gadgets we received for Christmas, Mr A&N and I gained a pasta maker. We had put it on our Amazon wishlist and crossed our fingers, and were gifted it by my parents. The gift was less of a surprise than they intended: having paid extra for the gift wrapping and specifying we weren't to open it until Christmas, they then wrote on the card attached to the gift "Hope you enjoy your present - there's nothing like fresh pasta!". All gifts are gratefully received here, and we finally had a chance to turn the handle on the machine last weekend.


The ingredients for pasta are simple - flour and egg. You can fancify it to make it green (adding water from boiled spinach to the dough), red (water from boiled beetroot), or presumably another color derived from the left-overs of other boiled vegetable water. Our main intentions are to make our own ravioli but we haven't had the chance to get the ravioli-making kit to enable that. I'm a by-the-rules sort of person who wants to wait to attempt ravioli until we know it won't be a complete disaster, while Mr A&N is just e-a-g-e-r and was trying his hardest to get me to throw caution to the wind and just go for it. Sometimes it pays to be stubborn; I talked us down from that precipice and our first home-made pasta adventure involved a simple tagliatelli cut and bolognese sauce.


We didn't revolutionize the history of pasta with what we made, but we did prove to ourselves that the effort was worth it. Home-made pasta compared to dried (or even supermarket-fresh) is the difference between silk and satin; freshly-brewed and instant coffee; a 3-day weekend versus a 2-day weekend. It's subtly, and yet substantially, different. It is smoother in taste and lighter in texture without feeling you've gone as far as eating something delicate. It is the pasta of Italy, the reason that the non-descript restaurant you discovered during your last visit seemed to serve the best bowl of spaghetti you ever tasted.

The greatest mystery to me is how your average Italian grandmother can operate the thing on her own. The 3-foot long sheets of dough that had to be fed through the contraption needed to be both lightly fed through and gently grabbed at the other end, and at least at the novice stage we needed all hands on deck to prevent disaster. Frankly, I don't think I have the right Mediterranean genes to ever operate it on my own. Pasta will have to be a team effort in the A&N household the next time we want to go fresh, but it does add to the feelings of family togetherness that Italian food brings out in you anyway.

A Slow-Cooked Dinner

The Christmas lists in the A&N household this year heavily featured kitchen gadgets. Besides us both (clearly) being into our food, our New and Improved kitchen allows us so much more cupboard space that we felt obliged to start gracing them with gizmos. Since we stayed in London for Christmas rather than traveling to see my family in New York, my Amazon wishlist gave people a chance to get gifts for us from a distance. The result was a veritable United Nations of objects: a hefty tagine, a lovely old-school pasta maker, a large paella dish, and a slow cooker (I'm not sure what country the slow cooker represents, but there we are).

Friends of ours heartily recommended the slow cooker way of preparing dinners while at work during the day, setting it going in the morning and arriving home to the finished article. Mr A&N and I were both easily convinced: we enjoy our one-pot meals anyway, and one evening a week in which we don't undertake heavy-duty cooking but could still enjoy a meal made by us has some very obvious appeal.


We've made two different slow-cooked meals since getting the appliance, both times while friends were around for a silly games day (between our new Wii and a large number of board games, our silly gaming cup runneth over). The first meal featured pork with white wine, sage, onions, cooking apples, and pears. The pork came out tender but the sauce didn't thicken as we would have liked and the separate flavors got lost in the general taste. Our second time around, we made beef with kidneys, onion, celeriac, carrot, thyme, a glug of red wine, and some flour to thicken the sauce. Again, it came out a touch on the watery side and mostly tasting of meat. Not a bad taste if you're a carnivore, but not the same flavor as you would have expected from all those things cooking together over a 6 hour period. Our friends were polite (and hungry - after 4 hours of playing games you can work up an appetite ) but we didn't feel the meal was up to the standard of cooking we would normally treat guests to.

Mr A&N has summed up the two meals we've made as tasting of the filling in a meat pie without the pleasure of the pastry. I still want to believe in the magic of the slow cooker (being able to prepare your night's dinner as you head off to work in the morning is the efficient person's dream) but we haven't found the right formula with it yet. I'll now be on the hunt for some slow cooker recipes and ideas, so if anyone has any suggestions or leads I will be very happy to hear them.

Happy New Year, Happy New Kitchen

I hope everyone has enjoyed a wonderful, restful, holiday season and that 2008 ain't looking too bad from this point-of-view, two days into it. I'm kicking off the year by not returning to work until 7 Jan (ahh, bliss - I do feel a bit smug about it), starting to think about my summer holidays, and reveling in my new kitchen extension.

The much-mentioned kitchen isn't *completely* finished yet, but due to some hard work from Mr A&N, his father, and a few builders and tradespeople, we were able to achieve the goal I set for us last winter: namely, to be able to cook our Christmas turkey within the comfort of the new kitchen. And oh, it is lovely. I am living in the lap of luxury, enjoying on a daily basis the following:

1. Hot running water. Ooh, get me with my fancy ways. Yes, our previous kitchen had been without hot water since 3 days before our wedding...in May 2006. At the time, it was low on the list of things to get done (making sure the people who could perform the wedding was slightly more pressing, them having uncovered a double-booking that week we were due to marry; the words "Is it possible to re-arrange your ceremony?" were taken in the best humor possible - i.e., not very well). It was a year and a half of boiled kettles to wash any dishes, and the occasional moment of me begging Mr A&N to just buy any new faucet to save my freezing hands. We reached a compromise in which I saved my hands by simply leaving the dishes to Mr A&N; it struck me as quite fair, actually.
   
   
   Out with the old...
   
   
2. Light, both natural and artificial. Ooh, get me with my fancy ways etc. Our old kitchen was a bit tomb-like, with there being little semblance of natural light and too small to be flooded with artificial lights. In the summer it was alright since everything is lighter anyway, but in the winter I could feel myself going a bit crazy whenever I was stuck in there doing the (cold) washing-up. Now, with lights galore and a wall of windows looking out at the garden I feel physically lighter. A dirty dish barely touches down on the counter before I whisk it away and wash it. Mr A&N just thought I was lazy, with my excuses of being trapped in a coffin and my hands freezing; he doesn't know what to do with this new dishwasher wife of his. Luckily, we also got an actually dishwasher for the new kitchen so I can keep up my lazy persona by running a load through there every so often.
   
   
3. Countertop space. We effectively had 3 feet of countertop space on which to work in the old kitchen, since appliances and other natural clutter took up the rest of the space. Suffice it to say, two cooks could not work in that kitchen for long without there being friction. We were so wounded by that experience that we now have about 4 times that old countertop space, plus a kitchen island that doubles as a table and chopping station. Hooray!
   
   
4. A cupboard for everything and everything in its place. No more vegetable rack in the front hallway, no more hand towels kept under the stairs or nice steak knives in the drinks cabinet. Every gadget, teaspoon, and roll of scotch tape is now hid comfortably within a drawer or cabinet. I even snagged us a pull-out food larder. OMG!
   
   
   In with the new.
   
   
5. Non-leaking pipes and no danger of an electrical fire. Mmm, this one was less funny. We knew our old pipe to the washing machine dripped a bit and caught it as best we could. It wasn't until pulling the kitchen apart that we discovered the dodgy electrics behind the scenes: a socket hanging off the wall, into which our oven and cooker were fed, having first been spliced onto another (wrong kind of) plug that would let them extend further to this hanging socket. All within the path of the dripping pipe. All a bit scary and v-e-r-y lucky to have avoided catasrophe.
   
   
6. Between-unit gap of greater than 18 inches. In order to get through the rear door of the old kitchen and out into the garden, there was a very small gap of 18 inches. I can't tell you the number of times I tried to carry something large through that gap without lifting it high enough, and bounced back in a Looney Toons manner after hitting both sides with said items while at full speed. The new gap? Oh, about 4 feet. I will need to be carrying something pretty big to have any more cartoon moments (though I am a bit cartoon-ish by nature so maybe I shouldn't discount this just yet).
   
   
7. Seats. I can now sit in my kitchen and enjoy a cup of tea, or, more crucially, have a meal somewhere away from the lure of the television. The seats were just bought and assembled today, and I don't plan on doing much else tomorrow other than sitting on one (or all?) of them, drinking tea and not watching TV.

So though there is more work to do, it is all so very good (minus the fact the under-floor heating doesn't yet work, but soon, soon). We've taken our old 6x9 foot tomb/kitchen and replaced it with an incredible 20x12 feet of joy. I don't think my cooking will necessarily improve because of this new space, but I do think quality of life and two-people-in-the-kitchen-at-once-happiness will increase, which is worth a whole lot to me.

A Proper Italian Coffee Maker

I love coffee (I realize I say I love a lot of things culinary, but it's all true. If I didn't love these things I write about, it would hardly make for an interesting post: "I feel ambivalent about dill. The end."). I have recently kicked the caffeine habit, but I still can't walk away from having a (decaf) coffee a day. This is because I have a new coffee maker, and it's changed my coffee-drink life.

I've long considered buying a proper Bialetti Moka coffee maker, the 1930's style silver thing you put on your hob and can get espresso from. I've had a French press for a while, though, and felt a bit silly buying another coffee machine when the first one is working fine. Besides, the type that you plug into the wall and are all glimmer and gleam and hot froth are much more enticing, and I figured that if I were to get another coffee machine it would be that.

I was talking to my Italian friend recently about coffee machines. She has a beautiful barista-style machine in her house as well as a Moka machine, and she said she shuns the fancy one for the simple, hob-based one because the simpler one makes better coffee. Realizing that what an Italian doesn't know about coffee isn't worth knowing, I promptly went out and bought the coffee maker you see above, and have been enjoying gorgeous cups of coffee because of it. After several years of almost buying a Moka but holding back because it might be redundant, I've now saved myself much more money by getting the Moka and seeing that I don't need an expensive, counter-top machine. I'm a complete convert, and like anyone who has seen the light, I've already been trying to convert others to my new-found culinary passion.