Straight from the (Jack)Ass' mouth

patience... patience...

i am one of those who subscribe to the old adage: Good things take time. like a fine wine or excellent cheese most things greatly benefit from just a little bit of patience.

i'd like to concentrate this time-enduring philosophy into the microcosm that is my kitchen.

yesterday i was home as always, and as always i was thinking of stuff to do. while i should've been looking for a job i was just to frazzled and distressed by the lack of any interesting prospects to do so. i ended up cooking.

admittedly i'm also guilty of having taken a bit of that instant gratification fastfood mentality into cooking; using canned, instant foodstuff to expedite my recipes. but yesterday a certain creative force took over and, coupled with the abundance of time, i was off to do something time-consuming.

i was gonna make pasta with tomato sauce.

big whoop, right? the lowest item on the menu? not the way i made it. nothing instant here. no sauces from a can. no spaghetti from the pack. i made everything from scratch.

i chopped up a couple of tomatoes and along with some onions and some stock simmered it for about 3 hours.

next up was the pasta. this was the very first time i tried making fresh pasta. getting the ingredients together was no problem; just some eggs, flour, salt and olive oil. no problem. but then i had to knead it into a dough... by hand. you know the saying, "can't take the heat? then get out of the kitchen."? i was there sweating away, wrestling with a ball of dough till it was just about right. then i had to wait for an hour to let it rest.

an hour later i was rolling away at the dough to make it into sheets. this was harder than i thought. mind you this part is usually done with a pasta machine. then, having rolled it out, i proceeded to cut it by hand into fettucini noodles.

i boiled the pasta up. drained it. put the tomato sauce (which by then has reduced to about a third) into the pasta. sprinkled with parmesan (EU peeps: the canister however did not say that the cheese was from Parma... tsk tsk) and i was done.

a simple dish that was about 4 hours in the making. how did it taste? to die for! everything was just right and was rendered more delicious by the painstaking process and patience that were incorporated into it's making.

if you got this far, you too, my friend, are quite patient in your own right. you deserve some of my all homemade fettucini with tomato sauce. contact me to claim your prize. ;-p

posted by Peejay @ 6/21/2005 06:15:00 PM