Pasta alla Charlotte and Simone
I am a little bit shocked to find out that it has been more then three weeks since I last wrote a post!! I must have been really busy to neglect my pour little blog so much. It’s not that I don’t want to write, it’s just that I hardly have time to cook, let alone blog about it. It’s sad but true…
And yes, visiting everyone’s blogs and commenting is even worse at the moment. It will get better at some point though. I can’t possibly keep this working schedule up or I will soon run into health problems… ( already have a slightly high blood pressure, so no need to make this any worse, no is there??)
And in the beginning there was....
Charlotte and I had been talking about making our own pasta for… well, almost for as long as we know each other, which is now a year. We met on our trip to Indonesia which is already a shocking year ago. Can’t believe how quickly the time is flying by! It wasn’t the first time that I attempted to make pasta either. My very first time was years ago during a cooking course for pasta at Oldenhof Cooking school and I hated it. Such a laborious process and the fact that we had 20 people or so in the class and only 4 or 5 pasta machines did not really help my perception of making pasta.
The second time was while we were at the kookstudio Amsterdam doing the last day where we had to prepare our own meals and funny enough when I asked Rob if he had pasta he gave me a bag of flour and eggs and I could go and make my own pasta. It was then that I realized that making your own pasta wasn’t really as hard as I had previously been let to believe, so it was about time that I gave it a serious other try. I can’t even remember if Charlotte began about the pasta or if I was the one who brought it up but either way, Charlotte was the one who owned the machine and had only used it once before herself.
We decided to have our pasta adventure on the friday and Tom was invited to taste the fruits of our labour at the end of the day… So you realize that we could not only make pasta but we had to make a starter as well. We already started out by chatting far too long so we suddenly realized it was late and we still had to start by grocery shopping… Ooops…
Initially the plan was to make tomatoes filled with cucumbermousse. However… the cucumbermousse turned out more like cucumbersoup, so we decided to switch the menu around and make – no surprise – an amuse with cucumbersoup (which quite frankly was not the taste we wanted, but ok…) and fill the tomatoes with a mixture that we thought of ourselves. The tomatoes were actually quite tasty as we filled them with mascarpone, little bits of sausages, chives and mmm, can’t remember, I think we put in red pesto or whatever else was in Charlotte’s fridge… Talk about improvising!
The making of the pasta was actually quite simple. I mean it doesn’t really need much ingredients and it only takes some time to make the dough and ofcourse flatten it in the machine and then making it into tagliatelle, but all in all I thought it definitely was worth the trouble. The biggest amount of work was cleaning the machine afterwards!
Drying on a rack... How clever!
The pasta sauce was based on a recipe from Jamie, which was then completely changed as we had to use other ingredients. We made it with garlic, bacon, carrots (very thinly sliced into long layers), some passata and ofcourse, parmesan. So rather simple but very tasty! Ofcourse key to making fresh pasta is to make sure that the sauce is ready before you cook the pasta as that literally takes a few minutes to get al dente. I’m not sure how long it was exactly but really very short. The weather on that day was so warm that we had dinner outside in Charlotte’s lovely garden…. All in all absolutely something to repeat soon!
Antipasti the french way (we had rillette, baked terrine of duck, tomatoes with mozarella and basil and grilled veggies)
15 comments