A 100% Homemade Dinner and A Happy Boat
We had a 100% homemade dinner tonight. We still had some meatballs and sauce left-over from the party last weekend. I decided that we’d buy some pasta today so that we could try to finish that up before it went bad. Well, after we got home from a little afternoon drive, I remembered that we had five eggs left from last weekend, too, and we had plenty of flour. A small plan was hatching in my brain. I first started a loaf of bread in the bread maker (the big oven is down for the count right now–it needs a serious cleaning after an issue with a pan that tipped badly last weekend). Then I got the stuff ready to make pasta again. It was going to be a good dinner, and 100% homemade.
The bread machine takes about three hours, so I figured that at about T-minus one hour I’d start making the pasta. Pasta dough has to be one of the easiest things I’ve made dough-wise. It takes two eggs (lightly beaten) and two cups of flour. Make a well in the middle of the flour, pour in the eggs, then mix and fold until you have a clump of dough. Knead it a bit to get everything combined, and that’s it–the pasta machine (and a lot of hand-cranking said machine) does the rest. Each batch makes about one pound of finished pasta. With five eggs, I made two batches. I had one egg left-over, which is just as well–it had a crack in it that I didn’t notice before, and I was nervous about using it.
With the pasta finished, I left it to dry while I started water to boil and got the sauce and meatballs heating on the stove. A little while later, I cooked all two pounds of pasta, the sauce was done, and we had a great little dinner. We don’t always have the time to do homemade everything, but it was good today to combine some stuff that I had made before with some stuff that I made today, and we got all of the benefits with only a couple of hours of work invested today. I’ve started to make large batches of the homemade stuff that we like, and I freeze the left-overs–this is hopefully going to make it easier for us to eat more homemade stuff this winter.
The other big event today was that we went to look at another boat. This was the third boat that we’ve looked at, and it is the first that was in really good shape. I need to figure out how we can pull this off, because I really like this boat.
jonathan
