Pasta for 26, please!

Saturday, May 12th, 2012

As you’re well aware, I am horrendously behind on my blog entries (although I always make bulleted lists of entries to write as they happen, so don’t worry, you’ll have all the details as they unfolded originally). On this night, I decided to start trying to play the game of catch-up.

I was maybe a paragraph in when Juan showed up with probably 100 grocery bags. So much for writing…As he unloaded everything, however, I kept trying to write. Things were going well into almost completing an entire entry when I realized that he had several bags of flour and two cartons of eggs on the table, and suddenly began to pour everything out.

Wait, wait, wait! What are you doing!?
Oh, just making pasta for 20-30 family members.
Oh, ok. That’s, you know, 5x the number of people in my family…
I’ve never made pasta by myself before.
Well then making it for 30 people definitely makes sense…

Before he had all the flour poured out, my laptop was set aside to take in this spectacle. Ana has made pasta by hand a few times (which, by the way, is so ungodly delicious it makes me question any pasta I ever ate before that I thought was good), but never for so many people—plus, she’s kind of a pro at it whereas Juan was borderline winging it. We googled “making pasta” just to make sure we were doing it right because it seemed like nothing was coming together. But after minutes and minutes of mixing the dough, the flour finally started absorbing into the dense mass and it looked like Juan had succeeded. Which is to not underscore how much we laughed and doubted the whole thing for most of the time.

Two massive balls of dough later, and Juan had completed step one of homemade pasta. Then it was on to the brownies, from scratch…I’ve never made brownies from scratch, but Juan made it look so easy that I wondered why I’d been using the nasty prepackaged batter my whole life…They do have some of these in Argentina, but nobody really uses them because it’s still viable and understood how to make things by hand and everybody here can tell the difference between homemade and premade. This is one thing I’m definitely going to miss about Argentina—land of readable packaging labels (because the ingredients are actually still real in many cases) and food from scratch. (Ana is equally fascinated and repulsed by all the prepackaged junk we have in the US, but you can tell she’s mostly repulsed). Plus I mean come on, if Juan can do it then I can definitely do it…

Then I retired to my room for a time and came back out to the delicious smell of warm brownies, as well as 522349798 pounds (or kilograms, should I say?) of rolled out pasta dough sitting on the table. Because obviously first it must be flattened before it can be cut into the pasta form. It was seriously an astonishing sight to see the sheer quantity of pasta that the masses of dough were going to make. We really had a pasta factory right in the kitchen.

Flour covered everything as Juan and Ana cranked out pasta on the Pastalinda machine for the next few hours. From start to finish, it took at least 5 hours to make the pasta. I don’t even want to know how much flour was used…

Finally, they finished and we had perhaps the biggest pile of pasta I’d ever seen in my life. It’s really easy to underestimate pasta (I think every time I make pasta I always have way too much thinking that it’s barely any…) but this was definitely a solid amount. It might even be too much for 20 people—imagine that quantity!!!! I gave Juan a big thumbs up, as I was impressed that he did so well making pasta (for 20+ people) for the first time ever. Granted, Ana definitely helped…her culinary talents never cease to amaze me!

And so, the kitchen coated with flour, the pasta party ended as we waited for the real party for the day to come.