For Christmas 2015, we got Dad a pasta maker. He wanted to make pasta, he needed a pasta maker. As he’d not long proclaimed he was cutting wheat out of his diet completely, I think you’ll agree it was the logical choice.
The first proper outing this pasta maker got was for a dinner party last weekend. Every month, my parents and their friends get together for a sort of ‘pot luck’. One person does the starter, the hosts make the main course, and someone else brings dessert. I started coming along to a few, partly because I’m temporarily living back at home and partly because FREE FOOD.
This has, to date, gone without too many hitches. We have the occasional ‘oops’ when someone can’t eat an ingredient, but nothing major. Until this month.
It was our turn to host. Dad naturally decided to make pasta. He prepared the dough with plenty of time to spare, and let it rest in the fridge overnight. So far, so good. Nothing to worry about, right?
The pasta dutifully rested. What it did not do was dry out enough to cut up. It rolled off the cutters merely perforated, like a doughy book of stamps.
And because the pasta maker had been rinsed out before the first use, the dough also came out a lot damper than it went in. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to separate bits of soggy pasta. Someone with experience of preventing earthworms from mating might understand, but I imagine those people are rare. Anyway…
We discovered this roughly an hour before everyone was due to arrive.
So, as you can imagine, all hell broke loose. Every section of dough had to be liberally coated in flour and pulled apart by hand. Bear in mind we were attempting to make enough pasta to feed eight people. I wouldn’t last five minutes on Masterchef. I’m like Gordon Ramsay without the actual cooking ability, all red-faced panic and swearing.
Mum’s carefully polished dining table turned into a flour-dusted production line of linguine. Her mouth was a thin, unflinching line of annoyance. We worked mostly in silence. Dad’s repeated suggestions of adding more flour were met with “we’ve GOT flour.” in unison, at an increasingly pinched pitch.
It took the three of us that full hour to split up the pasta dough and wrangle it into a bowl. The doorbell rang not more than a minute after we’d cleared up.
We’d saved the day – and little did we know that our linguine lapse wouldn’t be the night’s true disaster. The much-anticipated bread and butter pudding arrived on the table as uncooked bread and custard. Mum and I shared a glance that was as much ‘phew’ as it was ‘ew’.
In any case, it isn’t the parents’ turn to host again for another three months. By which time the pasta maker will be irretrievably stuck at the back of a cupboard. I’m just hoping he doesn’t start expressing a desire to rear his own pork chops…
