My all-made-by-me dinner

On Easter Saturday (is that even an official Day?) my mom and Derek came over for dinner.

We had a great dinner and I made everything from scratch. Well mostly scratch.

Ben always gets so excited when Grandma and Pops arrive. He runs to the front door, "Hi!" and then pushes past, "Where's Molly?" He's always upset that Molly the dog hasn't come too. But Molly doesn't have very good table manners so she's usually not invited to dinner.

I made lasagne and bombe di patate.

Matt had brought home a bucket of tomatoes the week before and I had already made tomato sauce with it. I had intentions of blogging about that but they didn't get me anywhere. I made such a tomato mess in the kitchen that by the time I had finished the tomato sauce and then cleaned it up I was not looking at the tomato sauce in a positive light.

Anyways, I made the pasta, using my gordon ramsay recipe and then rolled it out in my pasta maker:

Pasta dough:

• 550g Italian '00' flour
• ¼ tsp fine sea salt
• 4 medium eggs
• 6 egg yolks
• 2 tablespooons olive oil

Put everything into a food processor and whiz until it is clumpishly moist.
Tip it all out onto a floured work surface and kneed until it is smooth, golden yellow and springy but not sticky. Add more oil or flour to get it right.

Wrap it up in cling wrap for half an hour.

Pull off a kiwi-sized lump and re-wrap the remainder.


Squash that kiwi into a playing card-sized rectangle.


Feed it into rollers starting at widest setting and ending at thinnest setting - feed through each setting twice.

Then I hang each sheet on my clothes horse while I roll the remainder. If I'm going to further roll it then I hang until it's little dry and then feed pasta sheets through the linguine or other pasta shape cutters. I find that the thin noodly cutters do a better job when the pasta has dried for about five minutes.

After and between all my pasta-ing I started on the bombe di patate, or potato doughnuts. The recipe asked for (or called for - I guess recipes command rather than request?) 3/4 cups of flour. After I had got to the point of my recipe where I was supposed to be adding a little more flour if the dough wastoo sticky I was not happy Jan as my 'dough' was a big sloppy mess. I googled my recipe - the answer to all life's problems - and decided that the recipe should say 3 - 4 cups rather than 3/4 cups. Everything turned out deliciously fabulous and the bombe di patate went down beautifully with our coffee.