Cooking from Scratch
As dedicated readers of Scratchin’ It, you know we love to make pasta. Especially if the shape of the pasta is something we can form without the aid of a machine like an extruder or a pasta roller. Why? Well, we really think that fresh pasta is something everyone should make from time to time, and shapes that can be made by hand put pasta-making in everyone’s wheelhouse.
Continue reading “Cecamariti Pasta”
Thirteen onions. That’s how many we had sitting on our counter, even though we’ve eaten them like crazy over the last couple of weeks. It seems as though we just get the number of onions down, and then, pow, more onions in our CSA share. We know why we get a lot of produce sometimes, but it still can be daunting when you have a small hill of onions with possibly more on the way. So, we decided to make something new with some of those onions: a Savory Onion Kugel. Now, to be honest, we’ve never made a kugel, have little idea of how to make a kugel, and we doubt that this would pass muster as a traditional kugel (they’re a generally sweet, traditionally Jewish dish), and it’s unlikely to be kosher, but we won’t let those little things stop us Scratchers.
Continue reading “Savory Onion Kugel”
Can you guess what “bottone” means? We thought so, just from the picture. This is another in our ongoing series of pasta shapes, and we think that it’s one of the cutest. Plus, it’s pretty easy to make these bottone for your dinner.
Continue reading “Shaping Bottone (Pasta Buttons)”
We love to try new shapes for pasta. Sure, it tastes the same, but sometimes it’s just a lot of fun to have something that puts a smile on your face as you eat it. Today, we’ll show you how we made up some small bear shapes, which, when we looked online, might be called Orsetti. We don’t know for sure, but we can still show you how to make them.
Continue reading “Shaping Orsetti”
We’re always looking for pasta shapes that we can make by hand. It seems odd, doesn’t it? We have a pasta machine that rolls and cuts nearly perfect fettuccine, making a better-looking product than we could ever make by hand. Yet, we still persist in making some shapes by hand, or at least partly by hand, generally rolling out pasta sheets, then cutting and shaping them manually.
Now, these are two shapes that can be made pretty much completely by hand. Lorighittas are shaped somewhat like a twisted ring; it’s a traditional shape in Sardinia. Named for the iron rings affixed to walls to tether horses, this shape seems to be exclusively hand-shaped. Until we saw it in a pasta book (we don’t know which one, sorry), we’ve had never even heard of lorighittas. But, thanks to this page we now know a bit more about the origin and meaning of lorighittas.
Annelli (meaning ring), on the other hand, are simply those neat little ‘O’s you eat with a spoon. Only these will be better, of course.
Once a month, the Loft Cinema, Tucson’s local art house cinema, hosts a free screening of a movie for members. We really like going to the screenings, as we get to see some interesting movies, not to mention the free popcorn, but there’s one thing that we almost always have trouble with: the timing.
Maybe we’re on a different schedule than everyone else, but we find it frustrating that the free member screenings always start at 7 or 7:30. Since these are always packed, we like to get there around a half-hour prior to get a good seat, meaning 6:30 or 7, which means we need to leave the house about 20 minutes prior to that, which means we needed to clean up after dinner before that, and eat before that, and so on. Basically, we need to eat dinner around 5, and it needs to be an easy dinner with easy cleanup. Enter Lemon Pepper Fettuccine.
Continue reading “Lemon Pepper Fettuccine”
We’re in the process of putting together a dinner for about 25 people. Nothing super-fancy, but something nice, and, we hope, good. One thing that we really like to do when making food for others is to try it out in advance. That way, there won’t be any surprises (in this case, there was a small hitch, necessitating a change in schedule; more about that later).
Continue reading “Staff Lasagna”