Spaghetti is one of the Stardew dishes so far to the positive side of both the Effort and How Much They Appeal to Me scales that I could not, in good blogging conscience, go forward without throwing several wrenches into the operation, and by wrenches I mean various pieces of a meat grinder/pasta plate attachment for my mixer that I have no idea how to use. That's right! Frrrrrrresh pasta, baby.
ATTEMPT #1: I made this Bon Appetit dough with the dough hook and the mixer and it was...I don't know. Too dry? Or hard? Or overworked? And/or/plus I had not figured out all the parts needed to make the pasta extruder actually extrude? Into the garbage it went.
ATTEMPT #2: I called in some backup and in the form of Ivy and decided to make a hand-mixed dough with a higher egg-to-flour ratio. That dough worked! It went through the extruder!
It also...had a bunch of gray flecks and spots on it. Apparently my cursory rinse of equipment that I had not used in maybe ten years was not sufficient to actually clean it. Who knew? GARBAGE TIME.
ATTEMPT #3: Called in even more backup.
Success.
What's that? What recipe did I use for the tomato sauce? Since I went to all the trouble of making three batches of fresh pasta and it's tomato season and obviously making a sauce is a lot easier? Mmm yes well I already had an open jar of pasta sauce in the fridge and in this battle the home economist side of my brain beat out the deranged blogging side. For once.
ASSESSMENT: Man, a package of dried spaghetti costs like 89 cents and is pretty good. I dunno.
PROJECT STATUS: Slowly extruding
BONUS INSTANCE OF HAVING SOME FEELINGS THIS MORNING: When the girls were really little and people would talk about how sad they were that their babies were getting older or that they missed having babies or worse tell me how lucky I was to spend every waking second with my baby/toddler as I looked back at them with dead eyes and contemplated walking into the soothing embrace of the sea, I was extremely confused by this sentiment! Why wouldn't you want babies to get older? Like, as quickly as possible? They're so miserably, despairingly, unceasingly difficult!
But now, my babies have gotten older, to the point that we embarked on our last year as an all-elementary-school household this morning, and they are not miserably, despairingly difficult anymore. Sometimes they help out with pasta, even! And I realized that I feel...an undercurrent of low-key sadness all the time because they won't always be seven and ten and helping me out with the pasta. So what I'm saying is, I will never fully understand you, but I see you, baby people (???) and toddler people (????????????????????????????????????????????), I get it now.
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| Parenting: an exciting adventure in shifting unhappinesses |
