Pasta Night!

For a little while now I have been plotting with Chuck to make some stuffed pasta from scratch. We settled on using duck and a few weekends ago Chuck made up a duck and mushroom filling. We had to freeze that until this past Saturday when we were both able to make it.

First we mixed up the dough, it ended up pretty perfect, very elastic and smooth.


Then we added some ricotta cheese to the duck.

We took a small piece of the dough and started to roll it into a sheet.

This was one of the longer sheets.


We piped the filling on the one half of the sheet and put the top layer on. Here I am preparing to pipe.


Using a the back of a pasty brush we cut the first couple sheets into ravioli.

In the end the ravioli didn't last too well as the first few sheets we made were too thin and the moist filling turned the pasta dough into mush.

I decided I'd also try my hand at tortellini.

Brushing the edge of the dough with water keeps the sheets together.


I've spent some time unfolding tortellini at work just to see what the shape looks like so I was able to figure how to it pretty easily.

In the middle of the pasta production I got a call from Australia.
By this time Simone had joined team pasta.


Here's the all the pasta. We had to toss the ravioli because it had turned into one large lump of goo. Normally you'd bake the pasta a bit to dry it out, however we were so happy with our results we didn't think we had too. On Sunday we paid for this when Chuck and I had to carefully pull apart the pasta before cooking it, as it has started to get too damp and mushy. After Chuck very carefully cooked it, everything stayed together and it was really amazing.

I also made some mezza luna, when we finish we had a taste test.


Simone and my mom made cookies at the same time, Simone snuck some yummy cookie dough.
mmm...

After all the pasta making I got to try sabering a champagne bottle. I have a video of this which will be in the next post. It was very very fun.

Getting ready to saber champagne. Simone was soo excited.


Tika enjoyed a little drink and conversation too.

Finally I did some more crazy nail painting. It's become hard to stop especially now that some people at work are waiting to see what I'll do next.