Little Miss Homemaker

I spent a good chunk of the weekend cleaning and baking. I love baking cuz it smells wonderful and it warms up the kitchen. Since we had to go out to someone's house (see previous post) I made a chocolate cake to take, since mom has taught us never to go to someone's house empty handed. I also made chocolate chip craisin oatmeal cookies, a good thing to have, esp. when you're feeling low, there's nothing like a warm, gooey cookie straight out of the oven to put things into perspective.

I also made fresh pasta! Thanks to some encouragement from Jamie Oliver (not directly at me, but from his original cookbook) I decided to try making my own pasta. Also we had bought 5 dozen eggs, and still had about 8 left over from last time, it seemed like a good time to do it. As per my dear sister's request, I tried out both my pasta maker (mixes the dough and spits out the final product) and the pasta roller to see which was better. I came to the conclusion that there isn't one better than the other.

My Cuisinart pasta maker was definitely faster, but I wouldn't be able to make tortellini or ravioli with it since it only has certain cutters that it comes wtih. However, it has the advantage of not needing much sitting time, and I only need to worry about cutting the lengths off as I need it, the machine does everything else.

The Atlas pasta roller was much more fun, gives more of a sense of accomplishment. I had to mix up the dough myself first, but that's not such a big deal. Once you get used to the roller, it's really quite a lot of fun to use, and by the time I finished making my final batch, I figured out how to make my pasta sheet looking more like what they showed in the picture. Yes, I'm a genius. I made spinach fettucine and regular fettucine, so next will be tomato pasta of some type. Jamie Oliver has a great recipe for a roasted squash ravioli which I will have to try next time. Being the newbie at it, and not giving myself enough counter space made it a little awkward, but other than that, this is going to be my new pastime and fresh pasta will be part of my gift baskets come next Christmas.