HOME COOKING
Another weekend, a weekend of all the usual bustle: telly programs, the children squabbling over which channel to watch, us wondering why the children always get to choose what to watch and we don’t. What about our Saturday Kitchen Live?
A sort of bored and yet content doing nothing at all which will turn into a slight impatience, a touch of irritation that, although we are all tangled up in the sitting room, we are not doing anything.
Wendy bought me a pasta maker from a charity shop for my birthday some months ago, a big shiny heavy metal thing that we have no idea how to use. We sometimes look at it and say we should use it, but mainly it sits at the very back of the cupboard where we keep the food processor and the hamper, the lemon squeeze, that long white dish, the old grater and various things we never use tucked further away in the dark.
I have always assumed that we will never get the energy to make pasta from scratch but today Wendy is full of enthusiasm, googling how to make it, getting excited, chivvying the reluctant children into some semblance of excitement.
She wants to make it like her video showed in Italy, with the flour direct on the table surface. I grump; say it would be more hygienic in a bowl.
We tidy the dining room table, wipe it down, struggle with the machine and work out how to attach it to the table. We stare at it puzzled, look at the video again.
Wendy pours a large mound of flour on the table and gets the children to make a well in the middle. They practice, with varying amounts of success; breaking eggs into a bowl and I whip them into a yellow liquid.
Wendy gets Charlotte to pour the eggs into the middle of the flour circle but the eggs overflow the edges and at one point the small dam for our mixture breaks and we scrabble around gathering everything together before it flows away along the table to the floor.
The children have mucky hands now, well Charlotte does, James won’t touch the flour but soon we have a dough sitting in front of us, waiting to be flattened.
We have a tight happy feeling in our stomachs. Is this really how we do it? More looking at the video.
The sun is shining through the window onto our machine. The dough is looking very dough-like.
James has dibs on turning the handle of the machine and Charlotte, with our help, catches the flattened pasta as it comes out. Again and again we do it and it does indeed get flatter and flatter.
It really does look like pasta!
We try to decide how thin we want the strips and lo and behold! Thin ribbons appear, to be gathered up for later.
While I make a sauce of tomatoes and onions and garlic which I will have to liquidize because the children don’t like to see visible bits of vegetable, the children go back to their telly. I put the kettle on for the pasta.
We eat our meal, for once sitting at the now clean table, feeling absurdly pleased with ourselves.
(Photo. daisies. June 2022)
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