"So, what would you like to do for your birthday?", I asked one of our graduated youth girls (and babysitter/craft assistant)
She replied, "Can you just make something for me? I like your food better than any food I can get at a restaurant."
Well, she certainly knows how to flatter a girl. I love cooking and it's something she enjoys doing with me, so we made fresh pasta with a creamy chicken, mushroom and Marsala sauce. She also requested an ice cream cake, which I made yesterday (and it survived through our power outage.)
Something you may not know about me is that I'm a bit of a foodie. I love baking and cooking things from scratch, so I have awesome kitchen gadgets and great cookbooks. We used the basic pasta recipe out of the Williams Sonoma Mastering Pasta cook book.
With a food processor and the pasta attachments for my Kitchen Aid mixer, we were able to make it pretty easily. It is a bit time consuming to roll out all of the pasta (especially enough for a crowd of teenagers), but it's fun to do a few times a year.
Fresh pasta is amazing. It rivals chocolate, hot bread with butter and cream of crab soup in my book of the yummiest things on the planet. It's soft and melts in your mouth.
Charlene rolled and cut the pasta while I made the sauce, bread and greens. A trick I learned from the Food Network is to add a sprinkle of fresh nutmeg on creamy pasta sauces. If you've never had freshly grated nutmeg...try it. You will never by pre-ground nutmeg again in your life.
I didn't get a "beauty shot", because I was serving up teenagers and preschoolers and trying to eat some myself. Then I had to go school some girls in Just Dance on Wii (I had to work off that pasta and ice cream cake!)
This evening the sun was shining and the weather was perfection. Cool and breezy and perfect for playing ultimate football outside at youth group. Aside from the fact that hurricane Irene kept me up most of last night, our power went out and I had to boil my bath water this morning, it was a pretty good day. Tomorrow it's back to getting things ready for Lucketts and finishing up some freelance articles.
