The Right Tool for the Job

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Tonight’s guests are vegetarian, so I decided to make home made noodles for them.  I had been thinking that I wanted a thin rolling pin for noodle making. Yesterday, I visited the Museum of Art and design with my son and walked home from Columbus Circle.  The two and a half mile route is punctuated with house wares stores. I stopped in at most of them seeking the perfect rolling pin.

 

Most of what I found wasn’t quite right. As I approached  95th street, I  realized that what I really wanted was a dowel, cut to size to use as a rolling pin.  Luckily, I was approaching one of my favorite neighborhood stores, Grand Metro Hardware. Grand Metro isn’t a particularly large store, but it carries an astonishingly large array of goods from standard hardware , like screws and bolts and paint, to housewares, picture frames, appliances and lumber and plumbing supplies.

 

I also love going I to grad metro because I often use hardware goods in an off label way and the salespeople there help me figure out what I need to do. So , I went to the basement and asked for their largest diameter dowel. the salesman was nice enough to saw it to the lengths I requested with his hacksaw. I now own two rolling pins. My total cost $3.03, including tax.

 

After I got home, I sanded the pins and oiled them.

 

I set out to make the pasta today. The small diameter rolling pin made rolling out the pasta, even with semolina flour really easy. the last time I used semolina flour, my arms were sore for days. it was really hard work. Not only that, I was able to roll out really thin leaves of pasta.

 

After letting the pasta rest, I cut it up with scissors and now it’s awaiting cooking.

 

Our vegetarian guest had to cancel. But I already made a curried cauliflower soup. We were going to have kale with the pasta.  My youngest asked me so sweetly if I would make home made cheese to go with the pasta. It’s hard to resist that boy when he turns on the charm. My plan was to make Lokshen mit Kaese, the Eastern European version of Fettuccini Alfredo .

 

A last minute trip to Whole Foods had me standing in front of the fake meat section of the store. A seitan based sausage looked good, so we will have some sliced fake sausage mixed in with the noodles and cheese. I sautéed the sausage, so all I have to do is cook the noodles and assemble the dish and bake it.

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