Yesterday I celebrated a day off from work by making fresh pasta from scratch, warping the loom and finishing one of the Commissario Brunetti mysteries by Donna Leon.  All this while my husband was golfing in the summer heat.

I was alternating between being lazy and being productive when I decided I was going to roll out the pasta by hand, instead of using the machine.  Now, when I write “machine”, it’s not the electric kind, but the crank and roll kind that my mother used way back in the days of yore.  So you figure on the one hand, what is so hard about setting it up?  On the other hand, it was only two eggs’ worth, so it seemed like too much trouble for a single serving, if you know what I mean.  After all, I have read about the Italian grandmothers who used to crank it out with the rolling pin every day.  And, didn’t Norma Virginio roll out her crustoli by hand?  So if they could, I can,m right?  Tolkien has Gandalf state “The wise speak only of what they know” and now I know better.  Norma must have had arms of steel (or I am REALLY out of shape) because I could not get the pasta rolled out thinner than an eighth of an inch.  And you know what that means after boiling!  To get the dough thinner, I felt like I would have had to press down the pin to China.  By the way, pasta that thick does not twirl around your fork.  I am chalking the whole experience up to lessons learned.  And from now on, I am using the crank and roll machine.