Her Diary Vs His Diary

Sometimes you just need to avoid over-thinking things.

Cooking (Italian) for Men

Pasta is one of the easiest foods you can make.

Seriously, it must have been invented by a lazy man who wanted to be able to just pop it in hot water, boil it, stir it, add some veggies and voila... dinner is served!

Of course to reach that point you first need to have the dry pasta.

HOW TO MAKE DRY PASTA

Ingredients: 5 large Eggs, 1 lb fine Flour, Salt

1 Whisk eggs into flour until thoroughly mixed, or blend with a food processor.

2 Dump mixture onto a clean, floured work-surface.

3 Form a large mound of dough.

4 Knead the dough until it feels smooth and seamless in your hands. This will keep your noodles springy and al dente after cooking.

5 Roll out long, thin sheets of pasta with a rolling pin on a floured work surface from small handfuls of dough. Alternately, use a pasta machine. Be careful to have a long, clear work surface available for this step. Keep rolling the pasta down until it's the thickness you need, for example stuffed pasta should be thinner than noodles like spaghetti or fettucine.

6 Cut and shape your pasta immediately as fresh pasta dries quickly.

DRYING YOUR PASTA

7 Spread out pasta on floured baking sheets or baking paper in a dry environment.

8 Let dry until stiff to the touch. This could be up to five days.

9 Hang long pasta, like spaghetti and fettuicine to dry on a sterilized rack or a pasta drying rack, ideally something designed specifically for this purpose but you can find other ways to hang and dry it as long as it is clean.

10 Put pasta away in glass jars, tupperware, or plastic bags when completely dry and stiff to the touch.

CONCLUSIONS

Okay, so technically there is more work required to first make the dry pasta... but its a relatively simple process, easy to mass produce and you can store pasta up for years. Handy if you ever decide to get Italian cooking lessons in Toronto so you can "up your game" in the kitchen.

And let us be serious about this for a moment, many men out there are not that good at anything in the kitchen. It really is only during the last 100 years that men have begun to take being a chef seriously and even though the word chef now makes people think automatically of a man, men in general aren't particular good at cooking. Getting private cooking lessons thus makes abundant sense if you are planning to up your game. It doesn't have to be Italian either. You could get cooking lessons in Toronto for a variety of different topics.