A First Time for Everything

After a week of shopping, baking, and general merriment with my sister-in-law Julia, we decided to end the wonderful week with a huge, blow-out meal on Friday. The plan started with making homemade pasta, since we haven't used our new-to-us pasta maker yet. After poring through my primary sources (America's Test Kitchens and Jamie Oliver) I decided on a ricotta and pine nut ravioli a la The Naked Chef. Ross decided that a Paul Newman Marinara just wouldn't cut it for this situation, so he decided to take on a Molto Mario Marinara. Since we thought the deliciousness couldn't end there, we decided to try a new cupcake recipe from my new favorite cupcake book (see post: Vegan with a Vengeance) paired with a strawberry sorbet.

We started the day making the desserts. The strawberry sorbet was embarrassingly easy to make, basically you puree strawberries, sugar, vodka, a little water and a pinch of salt, put it in the freezer for 30 minutes to chill, then run in the ice cream maker for 30 minutes and done. I typically get a little nervous working with ice cream due to consistency issues, but the sorbet came out with excellent texture and froze up nicely.

For cupcakes, we made a chocolate cupcake with a cookies and cream frosting, both contained a heavy amount of food-processed oreo cookies. The Vegan Cupcake surprised us again, as the cupcakes were outstanding. These were a little bit richer (you really could only eat one in a day), but again provided an aesthetic quality worthy of a faculty luncheon.

Then we began the pasta. Truthfully, Ross and I have watched mom and dad make pasta a million times and it seemed like all you had to do is put some flour and eggs in the Cuisinart and press go. Unfortunately, we have a small-scale food processor, so several cups of flour and a dozen eggs later, we finally got the dough well-mixed. Julia and I rolled out the dough and stuffed it with a mixture of toasted pine nuts, ricotta cheese, Parmesan and an egg while Ross and Jayne hand-crushed the tomatoes and made a delicious sauce.



Overall it was a very successful evening of "firsts" for us newlyweds. In the end, it was pretty exhausting, so we followed up the meal with the next night with another first: our first delivered pizza. All in all, a very delicious weekend.