[C]8.1: Cooking Pasta pt 1

The kitchen was quiet on Lus's last evening before he left for the next mission. He looked around, wishing that inspiration would strike him. He really needed to make a good dinner again so he didn't lose the small edge he'd gotten from the soup, but he couldn't just make the soup again.

Sighing, he pulled up the recipe again and read through the ingredients. "If pasta wasn't so hard to roll out," he muttered. It would be so easy to cook up some fresh pasta with a sauce from the canned goods cupboard, and everyone would be super impressed by it.

He walked aimlessly from one end of the kitchen to the other, glancing at the few familiar and many unfamiliar pieces of equipment.

"How am I supposed to become a great chef?" he asked, slumping in defeat. "I don't even know what most of this stuff does!" He slapped his hand down on a strange metal device that looked kind of like a paper shredder, except instead of sharp blades it had a smooth opening.

Frowning in concentration, he turned on the small screen on the side. It blinked to life with a question.

Select dough type:

Pasta

Bread

Cookie

Fondant

Lus' eyes widened. "Does this… does this flatten the dough for me?" he wondered aloud.

If this machine could roll out the pasta dough, that would make it much easier. He checked the clock. He still had plenty of time, so as long as the machine worked faster than he did when he rolled by hand, it was worth a try.

Looking back at the screen with the recipe, he began gathering ingredients. He put the flour bin next to the counter where he planned to work, moved the salt container close by so he wouldn't forget it again, and grabbed the eggs out of the interbox.

The flour went down first. He measured out the mountain of the white powder, then grabbed a smaller measuring spoon for the salt.

Before he added the eggs, he mixed the salt through the flour by hand, messing up the nice mountain. Lus re-heaped it and hollowed out the center, creating a large bowl for the eggs.

Dusting off his hands, he set to work on the eggs. He had cracked enough eggs that it was becoming more natural, but he still had to stop to fish out pieces of eggshell a couple times.

Halfway through the twenty eggs, his fingers were starting to lose feeling from handing the cold eggs and shells and digging through the slimy egg liquid. He took a short break, stretching his fingers to try and warm them up more quickly.

Once his hands felt mostly thawed, he went back to work, quickly cracking the other ten eggs in. Finally, he finished and tossed the sticky, empty shells in the compost bin.

Lus headed to the sink to wash his hands. He flinched as the hot water hit his frozen fingers, sending an unpleasant tingling through his hands. He turned down the temperature a bit and just held his hands under the stream until they were warmed through.

Turning the heat back up, he got soap and scrubbed all the sticky, slimy egg residue off. He dried his clean hands, then sighed and looked back at the volcano of salted flour with slimy egg magma starting to leak down the sides.

Straightening his shoulders, he plunged his hands into the egg goo. He made quick work of squashing the yolks and mixing the egg, then began incorporating flour from the sides. Once the flour was all mixed in, he began kneading the dough, working it until it became smooth and elastic.

Now it was time for the real test. He stepped back and swiped his forehead with his shoulder, wiping away the sweat, then moved to the sink to scrub off the dough stuck to his hands.

It took a few minutes of hard scrubbing to get all the dough off. He also had to use his short nails to scrape a few bits that were really stuck on around his nails and between his fingers.

Once his hands were finally clean again, he took a chunk of dough from his pile, about a quarter of the whole, and headed to the machine. The screen had turned off, so he turned it back on and selected the Pasta option.

The smooth cylinders moved a couple centimeters apart and started turning. He carefully set the dough on top. He watched as it disappeared into the opening, coming out on the other side of the far cylinder in a sheet. He didn't realize he needed to catch it until it came all the way out and fell in a folded heap on the counter.

"Right." He shook his head. "Of course I've got to catch it."

He picked up the mess of dough, turned off the machine, then turned it back on. "Let's try this again," he said with more confidence than he felt. 

Lus fed the dough in again, this time making sure to catch the somewhat flattened sheet of dough. As he lifted it, the cylinders moved closer together. He took the end of the sheet and carefully fed it into the smaller opening.

He again caught the sheet at the end. It was already getting long enough to be difficult to hold and he wondered if he needed to use less dough.

Before he could worry too much, the cylinders moved again, prompting him to hurry and feed in the sheet.

This time, as it came out the end, he had to stretch his arms as far apart as he could to keep it up. Thankfully, it was already quite thin. He put it in again, amazed as it came out the other end in a sheet far thinner than what he'd been able to accomplish with the rolling pin.

The cylinders moved even closer together, but Lus couldn't handle the sheet being even thinner than it already was. More specifically, he couldn't handle it getting longer. He carefully carried the long, thin sheet of pressed pasta to a clean counter and laid it out.

Grabbing a knife, he began cutting noodles. He had to concentrate hard to try and keep his cuts even. Cutting uniformly wasn't a skill he had ever practiced, so it took a lot of work to keep his knife strokes even and parallel.

When he finally finished, he gathered up handful after handful of noodles, then looked around in confusion.

"I don't have anywhere to put these," he realized. Shaking his head, he set them back on the counter and washed his hands, then pulled the two largest pots out. He filled them with water and set them on the stove, quickly turning up the heat.

While he waited for those to come to a boil, he took another, smaller chunk of the pasta dough to the machine. It was still waiting for him to put the previous sheet through the smaller setting, so he turned it off and on again.

He put the sheet through the same number of times as he had put the first one through. This sheet was small enough that he could have put it through again, but he wanted all the noodles to be the same thickness.

When he finished with the second sheet, he moved it to the last clean counter. The water in the pots was boiling, so he dropped in all the noodles he had already cut and set a timer for them.

Grabbing the knife off the other counter, he returned to his newly pressed sheet of pasta dough and began working on cutting it up, trying to make noodles the same length and width as he had with the first sheet.