International Food, Venting & Cheers!

April 2, 2011

First, I have to apologize for the extended time between posts. There is just so much going on between our real jobs, working on the house, travel and some very needed short breaks from all of this. There will be a couple of posts in the next few days as I will have time to sit and spew what has been going on while I watch the final 4 basketball games for the men and women NCAA college basketball tournament. GO BUTLER!!!!

Let's get to the food first. Since we have most of our kitchen back (the stove, butcher block and counter space is a wonderful thing!), we have been cooking up a storm. We are so grateful to have this part of our house back after cooking on camping stoves in the garage during the last 6 month construction period. I fear that the 15 pounds I have lost during the past 3 months will be coming back to me soon :o) I will let the following photos help to tell the story.........

Rowan is our master pasta making QUEEN. Every time she makes this stuff it just gets better. Must be those European genes that give her the knack for doing this. She uses 1/2 flour and 1/2 semolina, eggs, salt, some drops of olive oil and warm water as needed ( a recipe our dear friend Nina, the Ms. Universe of pasta making gave us). The real secret is making sure not to kneed it too much once you get the dough together. The resting period for the dough is about 15 minutes and then it is ready to roll out and put through the pasta cutter.

The eggs are cracked into the top of the volcano of flour/semolina/salt. Then, very slowly you start to fold the flour into the eggs. If you are unlucky, you get a lava eruption of eggs coming down the sides of your flour volcano, onto the table and over the edge onto the floor. In the interest of time, we won't show you all of those pictures from our experience here :o)

Through some luck, this is supposed to be what the end result is. Once you have this ball of dough, cover it with a kitchen towel for a 15 minute rest and then get ready to roll.

Meanwhile, while rowan was whipping up the pasta, I was creating the Putanesca pasta sauce, literally "whore style spaghetti" in Italian. Interesting history of the dish can be found on the Internet here: http://www.foodreference.com/html/a-ladies-puttanesca.html

This is one of the most simple and delicious authentic southern Italian pasta sauces. It is simply made from olive oil, anchovies, whole crushed garlic cloves, red pepper flakes, chopped tomatoes, calamata olives, capers, chopped parsley & basil. Simple. Extremely flavorful and better the next day. This is major comfort food. Here are the sauce pics:

We had a blast making the pasta and getting flour everywhere in our new and improved kitchen. The dough is rolled through the pasta machine many times to get it nice and thin.

Once it is just the right thinness, it is put through the cutting side of the machine. The job is made easier with two people as four hands are much better than two.

The pasta is laid out to dry before going into the pot.

Our next international food adventure brought us back to India. It has been just one year since we returned from our sabbatical in that great country so we thought it was appropriate for us to make our favorite Indian dinner to celebrate. I won't give you all the details of how to make the dishes here again. If you want to see all of that, go back to the 2010 postings on the blog side bar and look at the posts from 1/31-4/25.

Here our friend Sally is helping to make the chapati flat bread.

A few of our favorite Indian dishes: Palak Paneer (spicy spinach & Indian cheese), Eggplant Bharta (a Pakistani dish), Chicken Masala, Punjabi Sukha Urad Dal (spicy lentels) and basmati rice. Yum! Yum! Yum! We even ate dinner like Indains, using our hands :o)

On to the new developments on the house..........

Most of what we have been doing since the last post is putting more of the inside of the house together - hanging pictures, adjusting furniture and working on the prep work for painting the outside of the house. We did have to do a little more constructing on the ceiling of the front porch to add some vents for that attic space. Rowan and I had fun by doing this ourselves.

Rowan remains the mathematical measuring queen, so she organized the spacing for the vents.

I, being the power tool princess that I am, cut the holes in the porch ceiling. It was really fun being up in the small warm attic space. Kinda like being 12 years old again and being in your fort, hiding from all of those grown-ups outside. :o)

The most exciting thing that has happened since our last post it that we had our first open house cocktail party for our immediate neighborhood friends. All of them have been very anxious to see what the inside of the house looks like. We invited about 20 friends from the neighborhood to this first gathering. We had professors of mid-evil studies, law, music, Spanish languages, neuroscience and assorted business people and artists from our community. We could never have entertained that many guests at once in our old layout. We look forward to having many more gatherings with our friends and family.

News of Spring being sprung, some travel and more protesting coming next...........