Anything Is Pastable at Home

Yesterday I played with some new toys I got for Christmas. Trying to figure out what to do for dinner I decided on an old family standard, Beef Stroganoff. I had thawed out a chuck roast over the weekend to use because dinner fell through. At the time I had trimmed all the fat off (which I saved to render down) and de-boned it and then just put it back in the fridge.

I already had a couple of bags of egg noodles in the pantry. My family only uses the No Yolks brand, I don't know why, but that is what my Mom always used. Good enough reason for me. I haven't liked alternatives that I have tried. I also prefer their short dumpling noodle to the extra wide one. But yesterday I decided to break out my new toys. My in-laws spoiled me with their over indulgence and gave me pasta attachments for my stand mixer!!!

I've made pasta before in school. It's not hard. Like making homemade yogurt, I don't think making your own pasta is economically any better, probably not even healthier, but it is fun, their is a sense of satisfaction and I am really into this concept of knowing what is going into the food I eat. By making my own pasta I control that.

Here's my ball of pasta dough made with semolina flour. The dough knife was also a Christmas gift.

Rolling the dough out after it had rested.

Cutting the wide noodles for the beef stroganoff.

I was making the noodles early in the afternoon so I let them just semi-dry out on the counter.

Here is my pile of finished noodles. I found they were easiest to cut to length after they were mostly dry. I just used the dough knife as a chopper.

I was debating on whether or not to grind the meat or not. Since I already had the stand mixer out (not like it is ever put away) I decided to slap the meat grinder on where the pasta attachments had been and grind away. Home ground meat is always superior to store bought and this is a case where controlling the food that goes in is important.

The meal was great! The noodles were better than I would have thought. As in my class, I find that homemade noodles don't cook quite as tender as store bought, but they were still very good. I also think they held the sauce better.

The Pastabilities

Tuesday was pasta day. Supposedly we were also making pizza but as the day progressed that fell through. As I have mentioned before, I really am not a fan of pasta. But you have to be able to cook things that other people like. Good! I was also working with two very green cooks who are eager to learn and the best way to learn is to teach. Great!

For whatever reason nearly half the class wasn't there. I just do not get the attendance issues with these people. Sushi #1 and Sushi #2 were both there so no problem for me. I've actually made pasta before many many moons ago. We actually own one of those pasta makers, looks like a toaster kind of. A gift from a previous life I think, used maybe twice. But the point is, I have done it.

I did have to slow the guys down. Let's prep everything first. By the way, Sushi #1 is the quiet one, Sushi #2 is the more outspoken one, who I think I relate to better. Our task was to create three to four servings which I knew meant about a pound of pasta. The recipe made four pounds so the math was easy. I also knew that a pound of pasta was easily made in a stand mixer which I grabbed from the cage. RK came over. Where'd you get that man? In the cage next to the other eight, you know the cage you're standing in front of? WTF?

I apologised up front if it felt like I was bossing the guys around but I felt they would get more out of it if they did most of the work and I kind of supervised. Neither had used a mixer before so I showed them how to set it up. We had a good looking dough going soon enough but like the day before, we needed to add a little more flour. We had our dough wrapped and resting well before any other group was even close to starting on their dough.

On to the sauce. I knew from my first class that tomatoes concasse meant canned tomatoes. So I grabbed a can of those while the guys sliced up onions, garlic and herbs. I let them use my knives which I had just sharpened rather than fight with dull class knives. Sushi #2 really likes my LamsonSharp chef's knife.

We got the oil hot in the pan. I explained to Sushi #2 how you look for a sheen in the oil to know when it was hot enough. I told him that we were looking for the onions to be soft and turn translucent, slightly brown but not crisp. Then I apologized for telling him something he probably already knew but he assured me I was not out of line. Then we threw the garlic in and I told him that the reason the garlic goes in late and we only saute for a minute is because we don't want the garlic to burn. If the garlic burns it will be bitter.

Again I had an idea of what I was doing because I had made a tomato based sauce in my first class. I showed the Sushi boys how to use their hands to squeeze the tomatoes out into the pan. I was also emphatic that we cook tomatoes in a stainless steel sauce pan explaining how the acid in tomatoes with react with aluminum. I could see the guys taking mental notes.

At this point our sauce is simmering and our dough is resting and our chicken is prepped. We're ahead of schedule and it's time to work on the pizzas for the Hero's luncheon. The guys prepped some veggies and Chef had me shred cheese in the Robot Coupe, a fancy industrial food processor. I thought we were all going to make pizza but I guess Chef got caught up in his element and he began cranking out about a half dozen or so pizzas by himself.

So it was time to get back to our pasta. I got the old fashion hand crank pasta roller out. I've never used one of these but I used to roll copper plate in college so how much different could it be? We started with some verbal instructions from Chef but things just weren't looking right. The dough was sticky and tearing. Chef came over and said we needed some flour on the table and showed us how to roll it down by degrees. Now it was looking like pasta, what a difference a little flour makes. We ran it through the cutter and we were making some beautiful noodles. We laid it out on the table and covered it with plastic wrap.

Finally it was time to cook the noodles and plate. I explained to the guys that for pasta we can use an aluminum pot since it brings the water to boil faster. Our recipe called for boiling the pasta in chicken stock to give it more flavor. We had a quart already. I told the guys that we needed a gallon of water per pound of pasta. So four quarts to a gallon..."wait, there's a conversion table in the book, I can look it up," says Sushi #2. No, I'm telling you, there are four quarts per gallon. I'm the only one in my class that knows units. And to think I prefer metric! So what we are going to do is do two quarts of stock and two quarts of water. I sent Sushi #2 to get more stock but he didn't seem to understand how to get it from the frozen container. So I had him chip it out with my knife and scoop it into a quart container and nuke it while I got the water. My final tip was that we always salt the water, a tablespoon or two per gallon of water. I overheard one of the guys say to the other, "man this is why we need to work with him. We've learned so much."

I let the guys check the noodles for doneness. They had never done it before but they did know how done they wanted their noodles to be. Good. So final part. We tossed the chicken in the sauce. Next drained the noodles into a pot, then tossed the noodles in butter to coat and then a spritz of lime juice. Then poured in the sauce and tossed. Finally I explained that the reason we saved the pasta water was because if we needed to thin the sauce up and want it to have some pastiness to it to stick to the noodles we could add a little of the pasta water. Since the starch from the noodles leeches out in the water it will help bring the sauce together. We added about a quarter cup.

All of the dishes were OK. The best dish was actually the salad that chef made with an awesome dressing. Ours was OK but Sushi Boys were blown away by it. Mission Accomplished.

Not sure what we are doing on Monday. Tuesday we have a field trip!!

Pasta, Sausage, Bacon, Eggs and Cheese

Don't worry, those are separate meals.

It's been a semi-rough two weeks. I thought I was home free from being sick as whatever hit me in the stomach quickly passed. But then something settled in my head and I got a sore throat that just got worse and worse until I had nearly lost my voice. Coupled to that was a dry cough, mostly while "sleeping." Finally, I think it has passed. I hope.

Friday night I did have a window of feeling mostly well and whipped up a quick dinner of pork chops. I went with a pasta side. Again, I'm not a fan of pasta but it's good to have weapons like this in your cooking arsenal because you don't always cook for your own tastes. The side of Lemon Pepper Acini di Pepe went very well with the pork. I would imagine that it would also go well with fish. It is such an easy pasta to make that you'll be shaking your head as to why you would ever buy something similar in a bag. And it's a great side if you ever "need to bring a dish." It reminded me a lot of Risi e Bisi, though with pasta of course instead of rice, and no peas. OK, so maybe it's just the cheese that is similar but it's good, trust me.

The plan was to have chicken last night but it hadn't thawed yet and I didn't feel like force thawing it in the microwave or under running water. For Rose's benefit, since she's been sick right along with me, I made pancakes, her favorite. I also made a breakfast casserole.

Normally I use Alton Brown's pancake recipe. But last night I went for something different and made sour cream pancakes. These came out very well except that I ran out of syrup. I only use REAL maple syrup. Period. Dinah on the other hand prefers that maple flavored corn syrup crap. So we have plenty of that. As a substitute I tried some locally made sorghum syrup that we have. Dinah, being a North Georgia Girl loves the stuff. Me, not so much. Rose liked it though. Surprise, surprise.

The casserole is something I came up with last year. My local coffee shop (for sale by the way for only $499,000) had left over biscuits every day that they just threw away. Throwing food away goes against all of the cost cutting, waste reduction mentality I've developed all these years working in the foundry. So I created this recipe as a means to use up those left over biscuits, hopefully something they could serve in the restaurant or at least at home on the weekends. Sadly, they didn't really take to it, though they loved when I made it. It is not original in the sense that you and I have both eaten something very similar somewhere, sometime before. But it is original in that I created this recipe straight out of my head, a first for me. This breakfast casserole is very easy to make, great for company and is so easy to modify to your personal tastes. Last night I added a half pound of crispy fried bacon to the sausage.