G la fille: travel day sixteen

monday december 1. day sixteen.

m and i packed our hobo sacks again so we could spend the last couple nights at his parents' house. while packing, i was rather surprised by how little amount of receipts i had acquired for being away from home for this long. staying with family and friends must have saved me over $500 by now. additionally, i seem to have tricked most of them into thinking it was a good idea to have me around. score.

i told you we woke up early! early enough to get breakfast at elmer's. it's basically a much better denny's plus it's got a gas fireplace. we were sitting there silently blowing on our coffee and hot chocolate when both waitresses came up to marc and simultaneously asked "want more coffee, hon?" and then did the "go ahead, shirl, let him have it" "oh, no, you give it to him" and finally they said "hon, we'll get you from both sides." we'll GET YOU from BOTH SIDES?! this highly uncomfortable conversation only became more sour when we figured out what these elderly waitresses reminded us of. sixty year old former strippers. cotton candy blonde hair, caked on blue eyeshadow, heavy black eyeliner and penis pink lipstick. they may as well have been wearing dominatrix outfits under their blue uniform and apron. marc looked slightly nauseous after the encounter and i don't blame him. and the worst part was that i had an opportunity to say "CHECK PLEASE!" while pointing my finger to the ceiling and wasted it. darn.

ah, i feel a motto surfacing. elmer's: ask the waitresses to top you off. (barf).

ok. this is a very special and interesting part of this post. marc and i will teach you how to make homemade pasta a la julia child. this is our first time doing it too.

so get out that big bag of all purpose flour and make a volcano shaped mountain on the counter. but wait. actually first you've got to clean off your counter with a clean rag. and dry it!

meanwhile, have someone else take the eggs out of the fridge and hold them close to the fatty parts of their body. you want to use kind of room temperature eggs. maybe not that warm, but definitely not refrigerator cold.

we tried an experiment. would the eggs warm up faster if i were angry or loving? hypothesis: angry would heat them up faster because i get super hot when marc and i fight. but loving would give us better juju because you're supposed to cook with love, right?!

you must love your eggs to warm them up properly. give them names. talk to them. eventually they will warm up and then you can crack them open.

we tried a 1 cup of flour for 1 egg ratio. but you can always add water if it's not sticking together or more flour if it's too wet.

crack them into the volcano and put the eggs into your compost pile. by the way, you should have a compost pile, it's good for your garden.

mix the flour and eggs together. first break the yolk of all the eggs and then slowly incorporate the flour into the wet part. don't just mash the walls of the flour in all at once! you've got to grab the flour from the bottom. the other person can act as head civil engineer and reinforce the flour walls from any egg matter that may spill out of the center.

once it's incorporated together, use your whole hands to knead the dough. you want the dough to be very well mixed and homogeneous. our dough was kind of dry so we added lukewarm water directly to the mixture and kneaded it in. the dough is very tough so don't worry about going overly bananas with it. marc kneaded it for at least ten minutes.

then suddenly it looked like this so we rolled it into a ball.

sprinkled flour on the counter and put a bowl over it. you have to leave it alone for 10 to 15 minutes.

mainly, we spent the time staring at each other and making up knock knock jokes but you can do anything you like. the dough won't explode if you needed to take a shower or something.

tick tock ... tick tock ... tick tock ...

so flatten it out and rip it into smaller sections. we made our sections about the size a snes controller. and you may need to use a butter knife to help rip it because the dough is so dense and hard. actually, now that i think of it, marc made the sections vary by all sorts of sizes, so it doesn't really matter how small or uniform the sections are. obviously, the larger ones will result in a much much longer piece of pasta but who really cares? we're just trying to make some edible noodle not challenge a world record.

feed it through the roller. it helps if one person turns the crank and pushes it down into the spinning rollers and the other person grabs the flattened pasta when it comes out. the first time you push it through, it will most likely have holes and look like plain shit. don't fret. you have to push it through the roller at least five times before it looks like real pasta dough.

see? this is what a strip looks like after only three times through the roller. each time, rub a little flour on it if needed and fold it a couple times. push it through the roller again!

this one kept coming out crummy and we finally figured out why. if you fold it too much and make it super thick before you put it through the roller then it comes out stretched and holey. only fold it a couple times. make it look like folded paper rather than a stuffed wallet.

like those folded pasta dough strips up top!

finally we ran it through the other roller which cut it into small strips. so we officially made spaghetti noodles. they decided to dry them on the oven rack.

so voila! this is how you make homemade pasta. we next made lasagna noodles. it's made the same exact way except you don't need to use that spaghetti trimming roller at the end. eyeball the pics:

cool. right? next marc had his hair trimmed by his papa.

would it surprise you to know that i fucked up marc's hair again with the trimmer? the plastic guide thing kept falling off and i kind of razored straight into his scalp. sorry m!!!

and then he somehow got a bald patch shaved into his head. i wasn't responsible for that one though. i hope this makes you realize how hard it is being a bald man now.