Making My Own

Late elementary school is where my mind ends up when I need a refuge from the seemingly impossible (but in the grand scheme of things, actually quite manageable) demands of college life. The thought of going home afterschool and time stretching endlessly on into nothingness…it seems so luxurious and so far away.

            One such afternoon, after walking several blocks home from the chaos of the sixth-grade hallway I decided that I would make dinner. I loved doing little things to make my parents (especially my mom) happy and I knew they would be home late that night. Surprise dinner would be perfect.

            I was hardly intimidated by any recipe as an ambitious and confident middle-schooler, and decided that homemade pasta would be a new challenge. I flipped through our binder-sized Betty Crocker cookbook for a recipe. So easy! Only three ingredients: flour, egg yolks, and salt. Time was my luxury – I had hours to spend kneading, rolling and cutting the dough into strips.

I pulled out our trusty glass bowl with the perfet slope to its sides; the one I used whenever the recipe included “Make a well in the center.” I dropped the golden yolks in the center of the bowl as the flour almost imperceptible avalanched towards them. The dough came together easily with my wooden spoon and I gathered it into a loose ball on the counter.

I rolled out the dough – as paper thin as I could manage – in batches. By the second batch I had an army of knives, spatulas, and various other thin, wedge-like tools at my side to aid in peeling the dough from the countertop. More flour on the counter! More on my hands; more on the rolling pin.

I mixed dried basil into the last two batches – a recommendation at the bottom of the page. The green-speckled noodles were fragrant and I wished I’d used the herb in the entire batch.

I cut the dough into wide strips – somewhere between fettuccini and pappardelle – and draped them across wire racks and propped-up cookbooks to dry. The kitchen was dusted in flour as the strips multiplied, taking over the entire counter.

My mom walked in as I put a pot of water on the stove to boil. “Homemade pasta?!” She had never made it before; she had thought it would be too hard. She was impressed. I beamed.

That pasta provided the sharpest contrast I had experiences between a from-scratch and a manufactured version of a simple food. I could taste the ingredients; individual grains were discernable in the texture; there was color variation in each noodle; the thinness provided a better starch-to-oil-and-cheese ratio.

I had replaced the homochromatic yellow chewy noodles from the box – what other foods that I knew so well could be entirely transformed?

fettuccini

pappardelle