Pasta, pasta, pasta!

 My work has started doing an annual staff fun day where we'll get together for a day at the end of our year (September) and do something fun instead of work. This year, I'm delighted to report, we went to a culinary school and shaped pasta! As an avid cook and wannabe home chef, this was a perfect day for me, tinged with issues only due to crabby coworkers. But a great day nonetheless. I spent many a moment trying to just soak it in.

It started with a tutorial on making the pasta dough, and we got a whole sheet of the recipes we would be making. Eggs, flour, and a little salt mixed together to form a dough. Ours was already rested and rolled, but I still got to cut a sample into spaghetti. We watch the roller go, the got to shape our own. We shaped two varieties: a tube shaped one with ridges that I forgot the name of and orichette, a pasta I was familiar with. We even got to keep the tools used to make them!

 Then we learned about three sauces. We didn't actually make the sauces, just saw demos and got recipes. I took a ton of notes and they are safely in my recipe binder under "pasta." The three sauces were a butter and shallot sauce with pepper, a fresh pesto, and a red sauce. One thing that he stressed in the red sauce was using quality tomatoes - San Marzano - because of the soil. I don't know that I need that, as I'm not big on red sauce, but it's always interesting to hear about cooking techniques.

After we had our demo, our own pasta was cooked (very al dente) along with the spaghetti (the thing I am making with the pasta roller). Each pasta had a different sauce and then we got a tasting plate. We ended with a panna cota, premade for us.

The day was really fun. I'm so glad that we've started doing this, and I'm also glad that it wasn't an all day, ten hour adventure like last year. Overall, a nice experience.