My First Pasta Party

Many years ago (as in, more than 5), I tried to make pasta using a manual roller that my parents had sitting around.  It was one of the first things "The Ukrainian" and I cooked together. While I don't have a picture of it handy, let's just say it was kind of thick.  Whole wheat on your first attempt is not something I recommend.

Years later, when we were registering for our wedding, the lady was pressuring us (as she is employed to do) to add more stuff to our relatively small registry.  To satisfy her, we decided to register for a KitchenAid pasta roller to go with the KitchenAid mixer that we also added but did not think we'd get.  Well, we ended up with both.

I know that I don't use the KitchenAid mixer enough.  I was using it to knead bread a lot until the smell of yeast started to get to me, and hot weather makes the thought of turning on the oven a terror.  I had planned on using the roller on the Valentine's Day after we got married, as I was going to make ravioli and had the filling almost ready and everything... finding out later that "The Ukrainian" had made reservations someplace.  In retrospect, I would have probably had a hard time using it for the first time myself.

Ironically, the couple who gave us the roller was considering one of their own and wanted to play with ours, so we scrambled to get the house ready for a little pasta party of sorts.  We used a simple recipe from Aida Mollenkamp, whose cookbook I mentioned in another post.  "The Ukrainian" and I did most of the dough rolling/cutting, and my friends were on sauce duty.  This worked out well, because the sauce was, well, awesome sauce *whomp whomp whomp* corny joke.

The beginnings of sauce.

Laying out to dry.

I don't know how people do this solo, but I'm sure it comes with practice.

Magical.  Probably should have kept it to a "2" and not a "3" for more spaghetti-like texture...

Leftovers our friends took to go!

Someone's plate.  Pasta had a nice, wholesome, buttery taste to it.  Best spaghetti I've ever had!

Finally, I had picked up some cupcakes because it was almost my friend's birthday: dulce de leche, watermelon, pistachio, cookies and creme, black forest, and red velvet.  I hadn't had cupcakes in a while, and these were pretty middle-of-the-pack... but visually fun!