Pretentious Pasta

I saw the creator of the Julie/Julia Project of which A Food Year was oft compared to back in January/February as a judge on Iron Chef America tonight. How much fun would that be? I now have a new purpose in life.

I conned Shannon into helping me make pasta tonight. By conned I mean I asked her and she said OK. I'm so sneaky. Since making fresh pasta is such a laborious activity without the aide of a pasta maker or, in this case, even a rolling pin, this took quite a while. I still find it extremely satisfying and quite worth the effort and my wine bottle rolling pin skills have got a little bit better. If you keep the seal below the cork on the bottle, it sort of "rolls" with your hand imitating the handle of a rolling pin.

If you're going to go through the trouble of making fresh pasta this way, I figure you should either pair it with an incredible sauce or something very simple to compliment it. I really wanted to do a veal ragu (osso bucco style) but I've already done too many tomato/meat sauce dishes and opted for the simple compliment instead, making Tagliatelle con Limone. This is just a pretentious way of saying "wide pasta with lemon sauce". This was way too filling for either of us to finish, maybe polishing off half of our portions. We both thought this was rather amusing since we could've shaved off half the time of making all that pasta. If you're into simply dressed pastas, this is not a dish to be missed. The pasta is incredibly light, which is the perfect texture for such simple flavors as olive oil, lemon and Parmesan.

I think, along with all these fancy French bistro techniques I'm just being introduced to through books and such, that I'm really becoming interested in old classic Italian cooking as well. I'm really excited about cooking my first rabbit soon. I'm just continually amazed at just how much depth there is to cooking and how I could go on learning about food until I die and still have only scratched the surface of what there is to know. It's one of those things where the more I know, the more I realize I don't know nothin' and can never know it all. It fascinates me and I grow continually obsessed with it. If only I could afford to sedate my desires.