We’re seven months into 2010 and I thought now might be a good time to review my to-do list for 2010.
Out of the 20 things on it, I’ve successfully accomplished the following:
- Made marshmallows
- Made Spanish churros
- Read 4 chef biographies/memoirs: Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, Daniel Boulud’s Letters to a Young Chef, Humble Pie by Gordon Ramsay, Spiced by Dahlia Jurgensen. Two more to go. Suggestions?
- Tried Tahitian vanilla, all thanks to orangefoodie.
- Grew herbs: lemongrass, more basil and mint! Now I just need some seeds for rosemary, thyme and oregano and I will have one happy windowsill.
- Tried two new salts: fleur de sel (should really make some fleur de sel caramels!), Anglesey sea salt. Three to go!
- And finally, I made fresh pasta!
Making fresh pasta is quite a task. And making fresh pasta without the pasta rollers is a task I grossly underestimated. After I made the dough according to the recipe in Jamie Oliver’s book, I let it rest for a while and then started to roll the dough out. What followed was a 40 minutes struggle to to transform the dough into a sheet so thin, a paper should be legible through it, well almost. Finally, at the end of my battle with the dough, I stuffed my chicken, cheese and mushroom filling into. Around that time I read about a chef extolling the virtues of hand rolled pasta in a local newspaper: because it’s not uniform, it is better suited for sauced to cling to it. Voila! And in addition to that, I saw my mom beaming as she bit into the handmade pasta tossed in my favourite hazelnut oil. That made it totally worth the effort. Although, next time I’d better invest in rollers before even thinking of making handmade pasta.