Helen Jackson

With Father’s Day yesterday, Daisy (9) decided she wanted to make homemade chicken tortellini followed by lemon meringue pie ^[1] for Ed (I feel she has been watching too much Masterchef antics).
As she has been asking to make her own pasta for some weeks now I decided that Sunday afternoon would be an opportune time to do so.  Thankfully I didn’t succomb to the $10 bag of Italian strong flour ^[2] that she thought she needed from our local NW.

After 15 minutes of scrambling around the corner in my pantry cupboard amongst more dadddy long leg spiders than I have almost ever seen and some shameful mouse droppings, I finally found the still boxed, never been used, pasta maker – bought around the same time as I entered my South East Asian phase and we switched from pasta to rice as our staple.

The Cooks Companion ^[3] (Stephanie Alexander) has fool proof recipes for everything so we followed the recipe of 400g flour, salt and eggs.  The dough was quickly made and then wrapped to rest for 1 hour.  We then poached chicken breast fillets and pulsed them in the food processor with pesto, parmesan, a little butter and seasoning – the mixture tasted just fine.

The pasta maker we screwed onto the table and followed instructions of setting the rollers at 1.  Unfortunately I didn’t use logic of inserting the dough and “shoved” it in the wrong place initially which then jammed the rollers and took a lot of hot water and poking with a skewer to dislodge.  Unperturbed I then set it up again and was completely ready to start rolling perfect pasta.
The instructions said to roll it 5-6 times but by the 6th roll we were still rolling funny looking dough with lots of holes in it and all stretched and bumpy looking.  The pasta maker somehow was putting big black smudges onto the dough and there was flour and dough everywhere.  It looked nothing like the pictures!

A big pot of water went on to boil and the ready made pasta pulled out of the pantry.

I quickly made tomato pasta sauce and decided that the chicken filling from the ravioli would mix in nicely with the pasta sauce – result was very unattractive pink gloop!
Freddie (6) sat down to dinner and promptly said “Mum this looks like vomit you don’t seriously expect us to eat it do you?”

Meanwhile I had raced to the garden, picked spinach, made spinach and feta triangles for Ed and I in record breaking time and got Daisy organised to get a lemon meringue pie into the oven.
Dinner for the kids was essentially dessert that while eaten it wasn’t quite what Daisy thought she was making – she was hoping for a cake!

After a massive cleanup and into bed feeling quite shattered – Ed then says “It is really quite amazing how much mess you can make when you cook…..”
AAAARGH!

Anyone got any tips on making pasta?  We need them!

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