La Cucina Italiana: Primi

Today it was back in the kitchen! 

We began the morning by brewing some espresso, munching on our very own homemade biscottis, and getting some inspiration from clips of both the Godfather and the goodfellas on youtube.

Our morning coffee was essential to the eating of the biscotti's, for they were hard...rock hard. As Isaac said, "they're like biscotti flavored lollipops!!" So in order to soften them up a bit, we simply dunked them in our drinks. Plus, its a delicious combo! 

The plan for today was "Primi"; aka the first course. This consisted of making our very own tortellini and ravioli pastas from scratch, including the filling and the sauces. In order to avoid chaos, we split into groups to make several batches of pasta dough. The process was both simple and complicated. Although pasta dough only consists of eggs and flour, the procedure of actually mixing the two has to be very exact, and screwing it up results in instant death. 

We made two fillings: a ricotta, parmesan and parsley for the tortellini, and a mushroom ricotta one for the ravioli. 

It's all about the fresh ingredients! Next we lined dollops of our filling along our beautifully rolled out pasta dough. Then it turned into an assembly line of encasing each little dollop of filling in an adorable shell of pasta! 

 Next came pulling together the sauces (two of them tomato based, one had garlic and spices, and the other was traditional with carrots and celery; the third was a creamy one), and cooking the pasta! We are so close!

Finally, folks, I present to you....the feasting table. The entire day we decided to play some classic Italian swing music (or something like that...?), and it reaaallyy got me in the holiday spirit (even though its april). As we gathered round the table to serve ourselves to some pasta, I truly felt like we were a family, sharing some thanksgiving dinner! It was a mission accomplished.

and I was satisfied.