Stories

Rivals in the kitchen and Saturday raviolli

 While we were having Saturday family breakfast Steve said he will be making pasta for lunch. I love food, believe me, but not to talk about the next meal while I am still eating the previous. Somehow, I have got a feeling that my calories intake is doubling and sticking to certain body parts.

Last night was a difficult one. Charles kept waking up with a blocked nose and coughing. The last back molar is coming out. Or horn, or whatever. Just let it come out so we can get some sleep. On top of that summer’s gone, heating is on. At least for a typical Balkan woman, not being ‘cold keen’ like any other decent Islander. We got up feeling beaten. I was very keen for the youngster to go for his nap, so I can stretch next to him and have a snooze.

Some 40 minutes later a rhythmical noise woke me up. Steve was using the rolling pin for pasta. I guess using the pasta machine for those purposes did not fit in his image of a cave man, hunting lunch with his bare hands. Today was not the day when he intended to spare us both of that face to face fight with the mixture of eggs and ‘00” flour.

Lunch menu for the day consisted of handmade ravioli with ricotta cheese and baby spinach, on the bed of tomato sauce with smoked pancetta and garlic, and green pesto. He even baked bread. If I am lucky I will only weigh 200 kilos. At the end he had to swap ricotta with mascarpone, which I must admit, was a good swap. After some Gaviscon for desert I was winning life.

Steve began to make pasta, quite successfully last year after one of the team buildings in River Cottage. His Company sent few executives that under normal circumstances could not sit in the same room without ripping each other’s throats out. That’s why the choice was wine tasting, cooking course type of team building and not climbing mountains like goats, pretending to enjoy zip wires, like the normal team building I was used to. I may have been a little bit jealous. Especially the wine drinking/cooking bit. I mean I have got nothing to complain about, I also spent those two days cooking…at home…with kids…and teething. He is a lucky bastard!

I didn’t write down the recipe today. But I did take photos. Maybe someday when he is not looking I will write it down and share it secretly. There is a particular cooking rivalry between us. We both have got dishes that we cook without interference from the other party. Ok, I did steal curry from him. We enjoy eating meals that the other one makes. That is, I guess the beauty of the competition. And if I need the whole army to tidy up the kitchen, he needs two. Rivalry!

Tomatoes for the sauce were grown in our garden and the rest of the ingrediencies were grown, picked and milked by someone else.

By the way, the winning combination for perfect pasta is 3 egg yolks, one whole egg and 250 grams of “00” flour. And lunch was divine.

 

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