My Sunday started at 9 am, making pasta. This is the part of the meal that I was most scared to make, and most proud of when I had finished it. The ingredients in pasta are very simply: flour, eggs and olive oil. I had to make a crater in the middle of the flour, and beat the egg and olive oil together until it was a all the same consistency. It was really difficult to not get the flour in the egg while doing this.
My cookbook suggested that Americans use a pasta maker instead of rolling out the dough, as this is something that takes experience. Of course this challenge made me want to roll out the dough. I discovered why they say to use a pasta maker. The dough was extremely hard to roll out, and it took me a very long time to get the dough to the correct thickness. By the time I was done my arms were sore from pushing so hard on the rolling pin!
To shape the pasta I cut it into thin strips and rolled it up on a knitting needle. My first few attempts at this failed. The first strip I wrapped around the needle while holding it in the air, and the pasta strip broke because it wasn't supported. The second time I wrapped it too tightly, and it bunched up when I attempted to push it off the needle. By the time I got to the third strip of pasta I had figured out the right technique.
To make the sauce for the pasta I put ripe plum tomatoes, chopped almonds, fresh basil, minced garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper in a big bowl and smashed it all together with my hands. It was incredibly fun, but the tomato juice stung my hands a little.
I added the cooked pasta to the fresh sauce and again, mixed it all together with my hands.
The final touch was to add breadcrumbs crisped in olive oil to the top of the dish.
Making the lemon pudding was very interesting. I started by rubbing 50 sugar cubes on the rinds of 3 organic lemons. This was very time consuming, and I didn't think it would work to get the flavor of the lemon, but it worked very well! I added the lemony sugar cubes to a pot of hot water with corn starch and more sugar. It cooked on low heat for about 20 minutes before going in the fridge to chill.
The final product was very sweet. If I was going to make this again, I would use more sugar cubes rubbed in lemon, and less straight up sugar. I think the lemons in Sicilia are more pungent, and therefor they only need three. With supermarket lemons in New York I think the recipe needed to be adjusted.
After putting the lemon pudding in the fridge to chill, I started on the eggplant roll-ups. To prepare the eggplant I had to peel it and set it aside in salt for a little while so it could "loose it's bitterness," which I thought was very interesting. After it had sat for a while, it was rinsed, dried, and then fried in oil. The filling was made of crumbled whole grain bread, a lot of flat leaf parsley, a little garlic, olive oil, and an egg. When both the eggplant slices and the filling were finished I rolled them all up and put them on top of a layer of tomato puree and parmigiano-reggiano, I put another layer of this on top. The eggplant was baked for about 20 minutes.
Right after I served the eggplant I was in the kitchen getting the lemon pudding all ready to be served next. My dad came in teary eyed and gave me a big hug. My eggplant roll ups tasted just like his great-aunt Mary's. She is famous in our house because my dad and his siblings are always trying to duplicate her recipes to no avail.
My first course served, but last course made, was somewhat of a failure. I'm not exactly sure what went wrong, but immediately after this picture was taken it got very hectic and started going downhill. The hot oil that I was trying to fry the cheese in sprayed up at me, completely freaking my mom out, and the cheese completely melted and became one huge mass of oily very un-appetizing cheese. My family thinks that I should have cut the cheese into smaller pieces, or put less in the pan at the same time. It ended up tasting ok, but it looked horrific, causing much laughter and mocking from my brother. Being my first meal, and the very beginning of this project, I would say it's a success that only one dish caused me and my family to laugh.
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